For 8 years — from 2014 to 2022 — Bill de Blasio was the mayor of New York City. And for those 8 years, his wife and the First Lady of New York City was Chirlane McCray. The two of them made a striking pair: she’s Black, he’s white. She’s short, he’s freakishly tall. She used to identify as a lesbian, and he’s a man.
I first learned of that last bit from an Observer piece that ran in the lead up to de Blasio’s first mayoral campaign. The piece — which I’m just going to say upfront that I hate — draws in readers with the scandal baiting headline “The Lesbian Past of Bill de Blasio’s Wife,” then goes on to walk us through the greatest hits of McCray’s public lesbianism: the personal essays she wrote in her 20s, her time with the Combahee River Collective, all of which came to a stop in the early 1990s, when she found herself falling in love with the man she eventually married. Why, the piece muses, does McCray never mention this stuff publicly? Why do she and her husband speak of themselves as LGBTQ allies rather than a straight man and his queer wife? The piece itself, I should note, does not use the word bisexual — but it does chide McCray for identifying primarily as an ally, conveniently ignoring that queer women who partner with straight men are frequently told that ally status is the most that they have claim to.
I feel like I should note here that I have no idea if McCray identifies as bisexual. It’s possible she doesn’t, for a long list of reasons, all of them personal and none of my business. But I can say that her behavior certainly comports with that of a bisexual; that whether she retains attraction to women even as she’s long been partnered with a man, or has seen her queer attractions fade over time, her behavior still counts as bisexual given her lifelong arc of attractions and relationships. It’s also worth noting that many bisexual women perceive themselves as lesbians before they eventually come out as bi, either because their attraction to women is stronger than their attraction to men, or because any attraction to women is perceived as negating attraction to men due to a pervasive monosexual mindset. In the 1970s, when McCray was in her twenties and writing about her lesbianism, there was far less visibility for bisexuality, and it makes sense that she would have understood herself as a lesbian, especially given her political bent.
But McCray’s personal labels and identity aren’t really the point for me. She can call herself bi, she can call herself a former lesbian, she can identify however she chooses. I don't consider it any of my business — because for me, true bi liberation would give her the freedom to just be, without being policed by the rest of us.
Including, for the record, her (soon to be sort of former) husband.
I’m thinking of McCray this morning because a piece in the New York Times just announced that she and de Blasio are separating. They’re staying married, but seeing other people, and normally I wouldn’t give a shit about any of this but because of who it was, because of the gross treatment of McCray’s sexuality that I’ve seen in the press over the years, I found myself curious to see if the L word was going to factor into the announcement of the couple’s separation. (I was not foolish enough to imagine that anyone would mention bisexuality.)
And… it did. About two-thirds of the way through the piece, after discussing how the couple met and fell in love and the strain that things like COVID and de Blasio’s ill-advised presidential run put on their marriage, there’s this:
While Mr. de Blasio said they had become so secure in their marriage that he had little reason to doubt its strength, unwelcome thoughts could creep in.
One of them, both said, involved their own parents’ difficult marriages. Another was about Ms. McCray.
“For the guy who took the chance on a woman who was an out lesbian and wrote an article called ‘I Am a Lesbian,’” Mr. de Blasio said, “there was a part of me that would at times say, ‘Hmmm, is this like a time bomb ticking? Is this something that you’re going to regret later on?’ So I always lived with that stuff.”
Proud LGBTQ ally Bill de Blasio can get away with saying that — with positioning his wife’s queer past as a threat to their relationship — largely because McCray once identified as a lesbian, and as far as I know has never claimed the label bi. (The closest we get to any indication of her current identity is an aside that “Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins” is one of her favored phrases.) But let’s be clear that what he’s saying is just unvarnished biphobia. His wife used to fuck women, and now she is married to him, but the fact that she fucked women once means that their relationship can never feel fully secure. It doesn’t matter whether or not she identifies as bisexual, that’s still biphobia at its heart.
And, truly: are you fucking kidding me.
It’s possible, of course, that the McCray-de Blasio relationship is ending because, after decades with this irritating man, McCray found herself wanting to date women again. It’s also possible that she wants to date other men, or non-binary people, and really, it’s none of our business. I hope she finds joy with whomever she dates next — and while a part of me hopes that she dates many people of many genders, that she vibrantly and vocally embraces bisexuality, I also know it’s none of my business. Because who Chirlane McCray fucks isn’t about me, it’s about Chirlane McCray and the people she is fucking.
And if we as a culture actually accepted bisexuality, then we’d already understand that. And none of this shit — not her “lesbian past,” not de Blasio’s gross hangups about her sexuality — would be considered newsworthy.
I've become extremely suspicious of LGBTQ 'allies'. I (cis bisexual man) recently dated a cishet woman who would constantly talk about her gay male friends, but when it came to embracing bisexuality in a potential partner she turned out to be insanely biphopic, with shades of homophobia (which somehow, though unsurprisingly, did not seem to bother her gay friends one bit). I say: show me your true colors before you earn the 'ally' badge.
Some days I really think there should be a boot camp for straights who want to date bisexuals/gay people, and if you wash out it goes on your permanent record.
And also an exploration of the really wacked out ideas that straight people have about queer sex, and why they so often see it as threatening if anyone they're involved with has had it. "a time bomb" indeed. He was the time bomb.