It’s hard to imagine lieutenant governor candidate Patrick Guerriero’s orchestrating a more low-key — or politically brilliant — coming-out for himself. A public figure since he won a special election to the House in 1993, Guerriero, though out as a gay man in his private life, remained closeted to his constituents until January 3.

That’s when the Boston Globe’s Frank Phillips reported in a front-page story that Governor Jane Swift’s search for a running mate had ended with Guerriero, who was described in the story as "an openly gay Republican activist." The fact that Guerriero’s coming-out at the start of his lieutenant gubernatorial candidacy was something of a personal and professional milestone wasn’t noted in the press until January 4, when the Globe’s Stephanie Ebbert followed up with a profile of Guerriero and noted that he "was long understood but until yesterday never publicly proclaimed to be gay."

So how did Swift’s handlers manage to out their candidate without making it a big deal — in the manner of, say, former state representative Susan Tracy’s coming-out just before she announced her candidacy for Congress in 1998? Simple. They merely acted as if Guerriero had always been out.

Phillips says a Guerriero-campaign source told him of Swift’s pick and described Guerriero as an "openly gay mayor and political figure." (Guerriero resigned from the State House in 1997 to run for mayor of Melrose, a position he held until May, when he resigned to take the job as a senior aide to Swift.)

"I knew he was gay, I didn’t know he was open," Phillips says. "I asked if I could use the information, and they said yes."

Reporters at the Boston Herald, in reporting the same story, say they learned through political sources that Swift was going to name Guerriero as her running mate and that he would come out during their January 3 press conference. When they contacted a campaign source to confirm the story, the campaign staffer denied that Guerriero would be coming out at the press conference, though the staffer confirmed that Guerriero was gay. "That really rankled us what they did that night," says a Herald source. "They wouldn’t go on the record saying he’s going to come out tomorrow. They basically wanted us to use that information as a fact."

After looking through newspaper databases for any previous stories noting that Guerriero was gay and concluding that there hadn’t been any, Herald editors decided not to include Guerriero’s sexual orientation in the story without talking with him first. As another Herald source put it: "My impression was that he was not in a sense an openly gay figure. He had never addressed the issue in any kind of public venue."

Given that Guerriero wasn’t available to the Herald before press time, the January 3 story by the paper doesn’t mention that Guerriero is gay. Instead, it weirdly hints at it by noting that Guerriero had drawn "criticism in some quarters" for supporting a gay-straight alliance group at Melrose High School and that he was a strong supporter of same-sex-marriage rights.

"No one gives us a blueprint on how to go about this," Guerriero says of his public coming-out. True. But the one he followed ensured that the first stories about his candidacy focused on just that — his candidacy and not his sexual orientation. As a Herald source puts it: "It was a savvy thing to do for the Swift people. They wanted the story to be ‘Here’s Guerriero.’ And the story would have been his coming-out and his being gay."

The way the two papers handled the information shows just how complicated it can be to report on the sexual orientation of a public figure, which Guerriero himself acknowledges is "newsworthy." The fact that Guerriero is gay has long been known to political insiders and reporters. Nine years ago, when Guerriero was first elected, for instance, I was working for the gay paper In Newsweekly. Someone phoned in a tip to the newsroom the day after the election that Guerriero was openly gay. My editor asked me to find out if it was true. If it was, she wanted a feature on the first openly gay man to be elected state representative. (Elaine Noble, in 1975, was the first openly lesbian candidate elected to the House.) If it wasn’t true, well, there was no harm in making the phone call.

I called Guerriero’s campaign office and left a message saying who I was, where I was calling from, and what I wanted to write about. Guerriero called me back and asked to meet me in person. He was gay and he was out, he told me, but he wasn’t interested in being out as a public figure. I didn’t write the story, but filed the information away — prepared to write a story about political hypocrisy if Guerriero turned out to be a Jim Kolbe–type politician. (Kolbe is a congressman from Arizona who was outed shortly after he voted for the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act.)

Guerriero, to his credit, proved to be anything but. Gay and lesbian activists told me that they could always rely on the Republican from Melrose to advocate on issues ranging from gay-hate-crimes legislation to AIDS funding. Clearly, Guerriero had staked out a role for himself as an openly gay man on Beacon Hill, even as he never really came out to his constituents — a divide he maintained until last week.

Should his political coming-out have been a bigger deal? Not necessarily — though it’s hard not to sympathize with the Herald staffers who recognized they were being played by the campaign and refused to go along with it.

"I’ve been really at peace with how I’ve gone about this," Guerriero says.

He should be. Gay and lesbian politicians looking for a guide to coming out publicly would be smart to study the way Guerriero did it. How it eventually plays in the Republican primary, though, may be another story altogether.

Issue Date: January 10 - 17, 2002

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