When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his bid for the Democratic nomination for president earlier this year, he carried the possibility of ushering in the country’s second-ever Black First Lady of the United States. But First Lady isn’t an entirely new title for Chirlane McCray, the current First Lady of New York City.
McCray first made a name for herself over forty years ago, as a writer, editor, and poet working at Redbook magazine. Her early life growing up in Springfield, Massachusetts (and later nearby Longmeadow) informed much of her early writing and present-day political activism. And despite identifying as a lesbian through much of her life, she found love in Bill de Blasio, eventually bucking labels around her sexuality altogether.
Chirlane McCray began writing at a young age, her response to racism and bullying.
Born in 1954 in Springfield, Massachusetts, McCray and her family moved to Longmeadow a decade later, becoming only the second Black family to ever live in the town. They quickly found themselves on the receiving end of petitions being circulated asking them to move. Later, while attending a high school where she was the only Black student for a time, McCray was subjected to racism and bullying by fellow students. She turned to writing, specifically poetry, as a reprieve and outlet for unencumbered self-expression. Eventually, she wrote a column for the school newspaper that denounced her classmates for their racist behavior, a sign that McCray was able and willing to confront injustice head-on.
Years later, while in attendance at Wellesley College, McCray joined the Combahee River Collective, a group of Black feminists who, according to the organization’s website, have been meeting together since 1974, two years after McCray enrolled at the school. “Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's [but] because of our need as human persons for autonomy,” a statement on their site reads.
She came out as a lesbian in Essence—and doesn’t use any labels today.
Five years later, after graduating and moving to New York to take a job with Redbook, one of McCray’s most talked about pieces of writing, a 5,000-word essay entitled "I Am a Lesbian," was published in Essence. “I thought it important to dispel the myth that there are no gay Black people, that Black people just didn’t do that sort of thing,” McCray said of the essay in an interview with Essence in 2013. “That article was my way of telling Black women across the country, ‘You are not alone.’”
Looking back at the essay in a 2004 interview with the Village Voice, McCray wondered why the piece wasn’t given more attention given that “there were so few—if any—gay women of color speaking out.” And though New York magazine would call McCray a “former lesbian” in a 2014 profile, she herself has purposefully evaded labels altogether. "I believe there is a fluidity that we are only just now growing to be more accepting of and aware of," McCray told Broadly in 2016, "because people do like to put people in boxes. ... I am just living my life."
She met her future husband, Mayor Bill de Blasio, in 1991.
The work never stopped. She served as speechwriter for then-mayor David Dinkins, for state comptroller Carl McCall, and for the city comptroller, Bill Thompson. In 2004 she left Thompson’s office to work in the private sector before taking a job at Maimonides Medical Center.
In 1991, over a decade after the essay was published, McCray, who was at that time working in the Dinkins administration, was sent over to City Hall to obtain some information for a press release. It was there that she first met Bill de Blasio, then an aide at City Hall. McCray, who was wearing West-African-inspired clothing and a nose ring, describes her initial impression of her buttoned up future husband as being funny and smart, according to a 2013 New Yorker profile. De Blasio, meanwhile, describes it as love at first sight. Three years later, they were married in Prospect Park.
Asked by Essence in 2013 if she was worried that he was a man—and white, McCray responded, “All I could think about was, He’s six years younger than me!”
Chirlane McCray and Bill de blasio have two children together.
Seven months after their wedding, their daughter Chiara was born. Three years later, in 1997, their son Dante was born. At that time, de Blasio began working for the Clinton administration as a regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, laying the groundwork for his eventual mayoral campaign. McCray, at that time, stepped away from her work to raise the kids and take care of both her and her husband’s ailing mothers.
“Some couples are really intense and wear you down,” McCray’s friend Carol Joyner observed in New York, “but Bill and Chirlane aren’t like that. With Bill so often at work, Chirlane built around herself a different kind of women’s world, centered on her kids, their friends, and other mothers in the neighborhood.”
She works with de Blasio closely as First Lady of New York City.
By 2013, as her husband’s mayoral campaign ramped up to his eventual election later that year, McCray worked behind-the-scenes helping to edit speeches and interviewing potential campaign staff. She also prioritized diversifying her husband’s staff, adamant that her husband’s administration be the most diverse in New York City history.
Shortly after taking office, de Blasio named McCray chair of the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City. In 2015, she launched ThriveNYC, a $1.2 billion dollar initiative intended to focus on mental health. Over the past few months, she’s joined her husband as he sets out on the campaign trail for a possible presidential bid. At Essence Fest in New Orleans in early July 2019, McCray joined her husband to talk about the discussions they’ve had with their son "preparing him for life as a young black man in America."
Will she go into politics? It’s not out of the question.
Though there is the possibility that she could become the First Lady of the United States, McCray has potential political ambitions entirely her own. “I have time to think about it,” she told Politico in February when asked. “I encourage other women to run all the time, because I think it’s important for us to have more of our voices in the public discourse and making legislation and setting priorities that are needed so much by our families. So, I’m thinking about it, but no plans right now.”
No matter her future, by refusing the limitations of definition, Chirlane McCray has managed to carve our a legacy rooted in doing things on her terms, unbending to, or often shifting, societal norms.
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