Queer and Roving on the Campaign Trail: The Only Openly Gay Member of the Massachusetts Senate
In part one, the scandal that brought down Mass. Senate President Stan Rosenberg, at one point its only openly gay member, left freshman Sen. Julian Cyr as his queer apparent.
Reclaiming My Time is a series in which I try to revive some of the writings I lost to the ephemeral nature of the internet. I originally wrote Queer and Roving on the Campaign Trail in November 2018 for the now-defunct NewNowNext.com, a subsidiary of Logo TV, which was owned by Viacom, which shut the whole shit down and wiped everything from the web. Thank god for Word doc drafts. This five-part series followed Sen. Julian Cyr as he ran for re-election and seven years later, paints a picture of the political landscape we would soon inhabit and the resilience of local government amid national upheaval.
NYU was a bit of a blur for me so I can’t recall when exactly I met Julian Cyr. He was a year behind me and I dropped out at the end of my sophomore year, but he was a tangential element among my group of friends, known for his fanatic love of Hillary Clinton. When we first started going, en masse, to Provincetown—the iconically queer haven at the tip of Cape Cod that comes lurching to life in the summer months—Julian, a native of neighboring Truro, would greet us and serve as our informal tour guide. As our annual trip became a tradition, we’d end each trip at his parents’ restaurant Adrian’s, a favorite of the Outer Cape’s small community where Julian had worked his formative years as a waiter, until it closed, after 28 years, in 2012. That experience proved invaluable at his current job, State Senator of Massachusetts, representing 20 coastal communities from Mashpee to Martha’s Vineyard to Ptown—a district of about 200,000 people.
“Everyone always asks me what this job is like and I’m always like, ‘Have you ever waited on tables?’ Because it’s just like that,” Cyr tells me during one of our many road trips around the Cape as he seeks re-election this fall. “You have to deal with all sorts of people, you kinda have your schtick and it depends what kind of party you’re waiting on—whether it’s a party of 13, or a couple that wants to have an intimate dinner, or regular customers who basically want to engage with you. That’s what the lived experience feels like.”
Julian Cyr
In one of the few bright spots of the 2016 election, Cyr, a longshot first-time candidate, was elected to the Massachusetts Senate, where, at 32, he is currently the youngest and the only openly gay member. But that wasn’t always the case.
“When I started at the Department of Public Health in 2011 as a legislative liaison, the first meeting I had was with Stan Rosenberg about the ‘beaver explosion’ in Western Massachusetts,” Cyr recalls. “My mind was blown. This is public health? This is public policy? I just thought it was the most absurd, ridiculous, amazing thing I’d ever been a part of and it got me really jazzed about public health and working with the legislature.
“And once I announced I was running—I’m pretty sure I gave [Stan] a call and told him—he couldn’t weigh in publicly for me because I had a primary, but he was clearly rooting for me. He was the only out member of the senate at the time and I think he was excited about having a young, queer member of the senate. So our relationship kind of developed through the campaign. He was tremendously supportive after the primary, he was hugely supportive in harnessing resources, helping me raise money, and giving campaign advice. He definitely was a mentor to me and a friend.”
Thirty-two years ago, when Julian Cyr was just coming into this world, Stanley Rosenberg began his political career, landing a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Five years later he moved to the senate. There, Rosenberg quietly and methodically built a reputation as a respected policy wonk pushing through progressive measures.
“He is probably one of the most strategically brilliant legislative minds on Beacon Hill,” says Cyr, referring to the state legislature, “and in getting things done.” He cites Rosenberg’s effort to keep a ban on marriage equality off the ballot, clearing the way for Massachusetts to become the first state to allow same-sex marriage in 2004.
Notoriously private and still in the closet, Rosenberg met what I can best describe as a professional stunt queen 37 years his junior, Bryon Hefner, in 2008. They started dating after the then-21-year-old college student ended a paid summer gig in the senator’s office. Like Rosenberg, Hefner had grown up in the foster care system and the two men bonded over their shared histories, though from the outside they didn’t have much else in common. But their love persevered, and inspired by his new beau, Rosenberg publicly came out in 2009. Shortly after, Rosenberg was diagnosed with cancer and Hefner stuck by him, nursing him back to health. Rosenberg never forgot that kindness, even when things turned decidedly sour years later. They eventually married in a private ceremony at Cambridge City Hall in September 2016.
Hefner may have also inspired Rosenberg to run for Senate President again after a failed bid in 2002. In 2015, he won the presidency on a promise to revolutionize leadership in the state senate.
“The old way the senate and most legislative chambers run is top down, the senate president calls the shots,” Cyr explains. “Stan believes in and ran on and implemented this shared leadership model, which treats senators as equals and makes sure every senator has a say. So when I walked into this environment where, under a prior regime, I would’ve been terrified to speak up, I wasn’t afraid, and I was encouraged, to speak up because of Stan.”
While Rosenberg was busy on Beacon Hill, Hefner was getting busy on the fringes. Ambitious to a fault, Hefner showed no difficulty in leveraging his husband’s power and privilege to further his own desires, which—according to Boston magazine—manifested in “unsolicited dick pics, incessant sexual come-ons, and wanton groping.” Hefner’s indiscretions may have been a “wide-open secret on Beacon Hill” but Rosenberg’s participation, awareness, or complicity soon became an issue.
The #MeToo movement has attempted to hold many powerful men accountable for sexual harassment and assault, though the extent of that accountability is constantly being tested, particularly along party lines. While the Republican Party seems comfortable with allowing an accused pedophile to run for governor and an accused assaulter/demonstrated liar/partisan conspiracy theorist onto the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party has rushed to act quickly and decisively to clean their own house.
“When it comes to #MeToo, the sequence of the response is driven by who has a seat at the table,” Cyr observes. “In Democratic politics, there are just more women who have a seat at the table.”
Stan Rosenberg’s circumstances were different but he paid a familiar price. By the time Rosenberg married him, Hefner was already a controversial figure for bragging about his influence in the legislature and cruelly mocking his husband’s predecessor on Twitter. But when the Boston Globe reported on four men accusing Hefner of sexual misconduct, Rosenberg stepped down as Senate President. Following another Boston Globe report in February of this year that Rosenberg had given Hefner unfettered access to his emails and Hefner in turn had tried to affect the state budget and interfere in senate business, the Senate Committee on Ethics launched an investigation.
In the resulting report, Rosenberg wasn’t found to have broken any senate rules, but his reputation and credibility were forever tarnished, and his 32-year political career effectively over. Rosenberg may have technically done nothing wrong, but he also did nothing, or didn’t do enough, to reign in his husband.
“Stan’s role in this is profoundly complicated. Stan is someone who’s a victim and who was abused by Bryon himself. If you want to sink your teeth into the [SCE] report it’s very clear,” Cyr says, adding, “There’s an underlying piece of this that people were uncomfortable with the structure of their relationship. I always just try to imagine if this was happening to a woman senate president whose husband was doing this, how would we be treating that?”
A day after Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker and Attorney General Maura Healey (the first and only out attorney general in the country) called for his resignation, Rosenberg acquiesced, leaving Julian Cyr the only openly gay member left in the senate.
“When the story first broke, we as a senate came together in a caucus and met for like eight hours. In some way I was really looked to to speak for and translate what the gay experience and the LGBTQ experience was—which, at first, I kind of did readily, but as the scandal wore on I became more and more reticent because I think folks kind of retreated into their corners. I got to get to know my colleagues in a way that I would have never gotten to know them—you get to see someone’s character and that’s a huge gift.”
Rosenberg’s exit also set the stage for Cyr to continue his upward trajectory on Beacon Hill, should he win re-election against Republican John Flores, a city councilor from Barnstable, the most populous town in Cyr’s district.
“In part due to Stan’s departure—and in part because there are a number of other senators for a whole list of reasons who will have left the body—in January, if I’m lucky enough to be re-elected, I will have seniority over nine other Democrats, which in a 40-member body is huge. In a way I’ve only been further catapulted by that shake-up. A part of me feels profoundly sad and another part of me...it just reiterates that everything in politics is about timing. It’s so much bigger than you. It’s about being in the right place at the right time.”
And what a time it is. The national conversation over politics seems only to get worse with each passing news cycle. So much so that we forget what politics should be about—not parties, but people. With the federal government increasingly at odds—if not outright warring—with the wants, needs, and desires of the electorate, local politics is the bulwark of the people. Through a campaign like Julian Cyr’s, one can see what it takes to be a politician—a queer politician, a young politician, a liberal politician— in this post-Trump, post-truth world, how the national conversation inevitably bleeds into what’s happening locally, and how local politics reflects what’s happening around the country.
The day I arrived in Boston, the air still carried the lingering sting of the Rosenberg scandal, which no doubt informed the concerned citizen behind an anonymous letter circulating on Beacon Hill attempting to implicate Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Matthew Beaton in something unsavory with some man, pictured on the reverse side. Who that man was or what was untoward about their relationship remained as mysterious as the signee of the letter, known only as “Truthfulness.”
The first official stop on my tour of Cyr for Senate 2018 was Boston Chops, according to Julian, the “premier gay steakhouse” in all of Boston. Upon some light discussion with our mutual friends who had come to show their support, its gayness was predicated on the fact that Julian just liked hosting fundraisers there. This one was intended to celebrate National Coming Out Day with Cyr’s queer supporters, but because he was scheduled to be on the Cape on October 11, the actual National Coming Out Day, Boston’s monied homosexuals gathered at this “premier gay steakhouse” the night before. I had always hoped that politics, on some level, was run by a queer cabal of wealthy gays and this was the closest I’ve come to seeing my hopes fulfilled.
Among Cyr’s supporters was Attorney General Healey, recently named a “Badass Woman” by InStyle, and for good reason. She was elected Massachusetts Attorney General in 2014 and has since distinguished herself as a tough opponent against the Trump Administration, suing them over two dozen times since 2017 over issues from the Muslim ban to DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, aka the Dreamers) to the gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency.
Julian Cyr and Maura Healey
In 2007, then-Attorney General Martha Coakley hired Healey as Chief of the Civil Rights Division, and in that role she brought the first successful lawsuit challenging the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which limited marriage to one man and one woman. In 2011, the Obama Administration ceased defending DOMA and the Supreme Court struck it down in 2013 in the case of United States v. Windsor.
Standing tall at a diminutive 5’4”, Healey is poised for the governorship, if not more. But first, like Cyr, she must win re-election, which may be a foregone conclusion with Massachusetts being a liberal stronghold and a beacon of New England progressiveness. But Cyr’s district is largely conservative and tends to vote Independent. Issues like the opioid crisis, the environment, and a sustainable year-round economy loom large for his constituents, but there are other, more insidious elements creeping in, such as the Yes on 3 fight. With the Trump Administration actively acting to erase the rights of transgender people, Massachusetts finds itself with a ballot question to that very end.
“Question 3 is a ballot initiative that was brought by people who want to roll back the state’s nondiscrimination protections for transgender and gender nonconforming people,” Cyr explains. “Voters could potentially roll back the civil rights for a protected class which is something that has never happened here before. The small minority of people who want to do this, if they even get a foothold in Massachusetts, even if the ballot initiative is opposed, they’re going to use that as fodder to take these sort of ballot-proven efforts to put trans rights on the ballot of other states that are much more favorable. If you can do it in Massachusetts, it’s a heck of a lot easier to do it elsewhere.”
And as I would learn over the coming days, Flores, his opponent, seems to be borrowing gingerly from the Trump playbook, pedaling in half-truths and pandering with outrage. He’s part of a disturbing trend in the country, but then you have another trend, one far more heartening and inspiring. The Victory Fund calls it a rainbow wave.
In 2018, over 600 LGBTQ candidates ran for office and of that historic number, 391 will appear on the ballot come November. Whatever happens with Congress—and at this point, no one seems to know definitively—Healey, Cyr, and hundreds of other queer Americans are standing up for something when it’s all too easy these days to fall for anything.