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MILESTONES
Queer eye for law and order
BY DAVID S. BERNSTEIN

Sometimes the best signs of civil-rights gains come when nobody notices what once might have been controversial, or even unthinkable. Such a moment came this week, when Cheryl Rivera of Springfield was named House chair of the Joint Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security, where she joins the committee’s returning Senate chair, Jarrett Barrios of Cambridge. The state’s law-enforcement and security officials now receive legislative oversight from two gay Latinos.

"I think it’s an interesting historical footnote," says Barrios. "I suspect that our life experiences might make us more thoughtful on issues that might have a disparate impact on minorities, however you define minorities."

They also can call on the carpet those law-enforcement agencies long accused of mistreating Latinos and homosexuals as suspects or as potential employees. Although the committee has relatively little influence over big state expenditures, Barrios has been able to hold high-profile public hearings on Department of Correction practices, fire safety at nightclubs, and alleged corruption at the state office of public safety. Contributions from the committee’s key affected constituents — law-enforcement employees — have helped build Barrios’s war chest into one of the biggest in the Senate, and his work on the committee provides him a potential launching pad for a rumored run for attorney general. This year he is pushing anti-gang legislation, which is likely to lead to hearings this spring.

The committee becomes even more important as it adds homeland security to its official purview in this year’s legislative restructuring. It’s a big move for Rivera, whose highest previous post was vice-chair of the election-laws committee. Rivera publicly revealed her sexual orientation last February, after the constitutional-convention battle over same-sex marriage. Both Rivera and Barrios, who married his partner last year, became House members in 1999. "We’re very friendly," says Barrios, who successfully moved to the Senate in 2003.

Their convergence atop the public-safety and homeland-security committee hasn’t caused even a ripple of intrigue — which is as it should be. "It’s great that they are Latino, and it’s great that they are gay, but I don’t see that it matters to how they perform their duties," says Wilfred Labiosa, chair of the Somos Latinos LGBT Coalition in Boston. "I just think that it’s 2005, and it’s about time that people like us can be in important positions."


Issue Date: February 11 - 17, 2005
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