Queer and Roving on the Campaign Trail: The Prince of Provincetown

How does one run for office? What does it take? And honestly, why would you want to? Call Gaga, ‘cause in part two we’re mounting a production of “A Politician Is Born.”

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.

Julian Cyr

Walking with Julian Cyr around Provincetown and in the other towns of his district, many of which we visited in the week I followed his campaign, is like being with a minor celebrity. Not an A-lister, but also not like an Instagram influencer, but more like a Bravo-lebrity. A Real Housewife, if you will, but from one of the good franchises, like New York or Atlanta. One of his staffers passingly referred to him as the “Prince of Provincetown,” and the title is appropriate. Our mutual friend Bridget recalls a whale watching tour that Julian was not only late for but basically ended up taking over, pointing out various species of whale at port, starboard, and what-have-you. While he’s not always going around shaking hands and kissing babies, he is always, if not in Politician Mode, at least ready to turn it on at a minute’s notice. With the amount of older white ladies fawning over him, you’d think he was pumpkin-spiced.

Throughout our travels I am often struck by just how good he is at turning it, the politician, on. Politics seems to come very naturally for him. And the one thing I always kept in the back of my mind is: I could never do this.

Some people are just born for politics. Julian Cyr wasn’t one of them. He wasn’t the kid dreaming of being president one day and standing in front of his mirror practicing his inevitable inauguration speech. His family isn’t very political, either, save for his mother’s side, where, according to Cyr, his great-grandfather, an Italian anarchist, became one of the first cases the ACLU took up when he was held for eight weeks by the FBI and then assassinated. But Cyr is quick to admit that his mom’s side just likes to “scream about politics all the time, but they wouldn’t be in politics.” Then in his junior year of high school, proposed education cuts spurred him into action.

“There were really big federal and state education funding cuts that basically resulted in a $1.8 million gap in funding to the regional school,” Cyr says. If the gap wasn’t filled, 40 teaching positions would be eliminated, including his choir teacher. Because the arts are always the first to go.

Like “any good gay boy” who found a refuge from high school in a Gershwin tune, he could not let that stand. So he organized a group of students, pulled together a newsletter (this was before the age of Facebook and social media) of all the programs at the school that would be lost, sent it out to every taxpayer, and he even got up to speak at the town meeting. To the students’ surprise and delight, they ended up winning and secured the much-needed funding. It was a pretty big deal. Julian went from “this quiet, reserved, clearly gay but not out kid” to an organizer, activist and leader, and, he realized, “I kind of liked it.”

It would be over a decade before he seriously thought of running for office, but in the interim he studied arts advocacy at NYU, went into public health, worked under former Governor Deval Patrick—the first and only African American governor of Massachusetts—and interned at the Obama White House. He got a front row seat to the inner workings of government.

While working for Patrick, around 2011 or 2012, Cyr got a different front row seat, this time to systemic inequity. After watching a Bruins game at a bar in downtown Boston on Washington Street, across the street from where he worked, they were approached by three inebriated bros asking for cab fare. Cyr begged off and walked away but his friend, who was also pretty drunk, was more confrontational and the three men started pushing him. Cyr immediately called 911 but things started to escalate. At the nearby 7-11, no one bothered to do anything. The assaulters had already disappeared by the time the cops arrived, 19 minutes later—they didn’t even bother to get out of their squad car and didn’t seem to take the attack, what Cyr refers to as a hate crime, seriously.

The situation left Cyr hurt and upset, not so much for the attack, but for the response to it. Being a privileged cis white man, Cyr sent a few emails and the next morning he gets a call from the mayor’s chief of staff, apologizing.

“We ended up having an interview downtown,” Cyr says. “As we were leaving the police station, the interviewer, who couldn’t have been nicer, turned to me and said, ‘Boy, I wish I had the kind of connections you boys do.’ And that enraged me. I wanted accountability on this. It’s not about perceived justice for me or my friend. Here we are two white gay men, we’ve got a lot of privilege and power, but when someone else is in this situation, when someone else needs help, they don’t even have that point of redress.”

With a passion for social justice and experience to spare, Cyr realized a few years ago that he could run for office. Then the stars sort of aligned to make his run for the Massachusetts state senate in 2016 a reality.

Cyr with staff

He initially thought of running for state representative in 2014 amid rumors that there was going to be a shift in the people seeking office. Then, in the summer of 2015, he ran into then-current state senator Dan Wolf, a very popular and progressive presence on Beacon Hill, who informed Cyr that he wasn’t seeking re-election. Cyr thought the state rep would run for the seat, as these situations tend to go, but that didn’t happen. Once he realized that someone who was less qualified than him was seeking Wolf’s seat, Cyr couldn’t help but wonder, “Is this something I should do?” So he started teasing the idea and chatting with his inner circle.

“The experience of running for office, and the decision to run, is most like coming out,” Cyr observes. “You first have to come out to yourself that you want to do it. And then you tell your closest or most trusted people.”

He remembers a dinner with his family where he announced his decision to run. His family was, shall we say, not super thrilled.

“When he first decided to run, we were like, ‘Wow, why do you want to do this? Why do you want to put yourself out there like that?’” Adrian Cyr, Julian’s dad, says. “It took us a little while to get on board with it. It wasn’t the life that I necessarily thought Julian was going to go towards. But it’s his dharma. This is his calling, for sure.”

“His first campaign, in 2016, that was intense,” Annette Cyr, Julian’s mom, recalls. “He was a virtual unknown and we had to get out there and tell people about him.” This time around, however, both senior Cyrs agree, is a lot easier. “He has a bigger staff,” she adds, laughing.

Cyr with parents Annette and Adrian

So how does one go about running for office?

“There are some basics in organizing, for anyone who wants to run,” Cyr says. “What do you do to get on the ballot? You have to get nomination papers and signatures, so there’s that logistical component. What do you have to do to get people to vote for you? They either have to meet you or to hear a narrative about you that really compels them to support you. We know the most effective way to get someone to do something in politics is a personal connection. People end up endorsing the idea or a perception of a person they’ve never met, which is really kind of bizarre if you think about it.”

Then comes the list-making.

“I started by meeting with different people asking, How do I go about doing this? And I got this advice from John Walsh, who ran Deval Patrick’s campaign,” Cyr says. Patrick ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2006 and his grassroots campaign served as a model for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. David Axelrod and David Plouffe, who ran that historic campaign, were consultants for Patrick’s 2006 run.

Cyr continues: “John says you gotta do two things: One, you gotta write a list of every single issue and big thing you care about. What would be made better in the world if you were state senator, governor, state rep, selectman? And then you have to consolidate and prioritize. So we had like 30 or 40 issues, then I worked with a group of close friends and family to narrow down the list. You narrow it down to your top three priorities—your three islands, the three things you keep coming back to. The average interaction you’re going to have with a voter is 23 to 27 seconds. So what are you going to say in that tiny chunk of time to convince them to vote for you?

“John’s second [bit of] advice was to make a list of every single person that you know and write down what you think they would do for you—would they knock doors, volunteer, give you money, can they design websites?—and how much you’d be willing to ask them to write you as a donation. You cannot get very far in a campaign without a lot of people being a part of it. And it very quickly becomes a lot bigger than you.”

Cyr specifically benefited from being a part of three communities: the political community in Boston, thanks to his work in the Department of Public Health and Gov. Patrick’s office; the community of Cape Cod, where he had grown up and his family had operated a restaurant for years; and the LGBTQ community. He served six years on the Massachusetts Commission on LGBTQ Youth, including two as chair.

“I had developed really strong, deep relationships with activists in the LGBTQ community,” he says, “which is a community that, frankly, can raise a shit-ton of money.”

Deval Patrick also gave him an invaluable piece of advice that he kept with him during that first campaign: Don’t be afraid to lose. Run like you’re not thinking about, Oh, if I say this will it get me elected or not?

“Maybe it’s because of my age, or whatever, but all of the [2016] campaign I was like, Fuck it,” Cyr says. “This is a big, huge opportunity, and worst-case scenario, I’m just going to learn a shit-ton about myself, will have worked really, really hard, and just have like a bunch of credit card debt. I’ll figure out what’s next. And that was so empowering. To be like, Wait, this isn’t about me saying the right thing or the wrong thing. This is about me doing something.”

Even with all his experience and all his connections, there were moments nearly everyday in that first campaign when Cyr didn’t know what he was doing or what was happening. He found cold calling people for money to be particularly anxiety-inducing, so much so he started taking a low dose of Prozac.

“You’re making a big ask of someone,” he says of those fundraising calls. “For anyone you don’t know too well you can send an email. But if you know someone well and want to get their support and want to get them involved, you have to call them.”

So what if you’re not a privileged, cis white man? First of all, congratulations. But if you want to run for office, being The Other carries with it some considerable baggage.

“For anyone who’s grown up experiencing doubt, being left out, discrimination—running for office really compounds that feeling,” Cyr says. “That’s what you put yourself out to experience everyday. It’s kind of almost triggering, though that may be too simplistic a word for it. It puts you back in this vulnerable public space. And that’s, in part, why it’s so much harder for people who have experienced oppression—and I’m certainly on the way privileged end of this—that stuff comes back up. It’s a barrier for queer folks, for many women, and folks of color to actually be able to get from ‘Hey, should I do this?’ to ‘I’m going to do this.’”

Cyr suggests clearing this hurdle by interrogating your decision to run further: “If you’re thinking about doing this, the worst outcome is that you lose. Be willing to fail. Start talking about it with friends and people that you trust. The train starts moving and you can’t get off and all of a sudden you’re running for office.”

He also stresses the importance of having a strong support system. According to Cyr, by far the most rewarding part of his first campaign and his tenure as a state senator are the people who helped him along the way and the personal bonds he’s built with them.

“That’s what endures,” he says. “People end up doing remarkable shit for you. At some point, you’re going to be like, Fuck me. And then out of the blue, you have people who will show up and do amazing things for you, even people you don’t expect to show up. They’ll give their entire day making phone calls or knocking doors. Regardless of how long your campaign lasts, that part of it is the best reward.

“It also helps when you win,” he is quick to add. “I mean, let’s be honest!”

So why should you run for office? Especially when the system seems more rigged than ever? Or maybe the cracks in the foundation are just easier to see? Well, you can say that our very democracy depends on it.

“In our political system we’ve gotten far too comfortable re-electing people until they don’t want the position anymore,” Cyr says. “We have to make it much more accessible and easy for people to run for office, for people to primary people. Just by running and getting involved you’re actually improving the political situation. I think competitive elections make incumbents better public servants because they have to work harder for it.”

Which brings us to Cyr’s 2018 campaign. Now the incumbent, Cyr has learned quite a lot in the two years he’s been in the senate. And he seems much more comfortable in his role. I followed him canvassing (you know, knocking on doors) and making calls to donors, but sans the anxiety he previously described. A big part of this evolution has to do with his staff, a dedicated team of veterans and newbies alike working together to secure his second term.