Jarrett Barrios and Liz Malia

The Boston Phoenix
November 1999

Out on the hill

The Bay State's two openly gay reps, Jarrett Barrios and Liz Malia, reflect on a bittersweet freshman year

by Tom Witkowski
The year 1999 had all the makings of a political watershed for the gay and lesbian community in Massachusetts. The gold dome of the State House might almost have taken on a lavender hue as the first openly gay state reps elected in more than two decades began their first full terms.
One of them, Liz Malia, had arrived after winning a March 1998 special election to replace her former boss, John McDonough, in the seat representing the 11th Suffolk District. She was the second open lesbian elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives; Elaine Noble, who has since left the House, had won the honor of being first in 1975. Noble was forced to endure the ignorance of her colleagues, not to mention harassment and vandalism in her Back Bay district, but she helped make the State House a sufficiently different place that by 1989, when Malia went to work there as an aide for McDonough, being openly gay was not a shocker. Not as common as being Irish, but not a shocker.
Then, in September 1998, Jarrett Barrios walloped a five-term incumbent and two other challengers to face Republican Ron Potvin in the November general election in the very, very Democratic 28th Middlesex District. Barrios cruised to victory and became the first openly gay man -- not to mention the first openly gay Latino man -- to be elected to the Massachusetts House. When he was sworn in this past January, he and Malia became, as they joked, two-thirds of the legislators needed to form a gay and lesbian caucus.
But during that same period, two specters arose on Beacon Hill that tempered the joy of those victories. The biggest blow was a disappointing last-minute defeat of domestic-partnership benefits for city employees in Boston. Gays and lesbians had long worked to win such benefits in Boston, and there was even a movement to pass a law to offer them statewide this past year. But progressive legislators reasoned that a Boston home-rule petition allowing the benefits, which made it through the House and Senate, offered the best chance for victory. Governor Paul Cellucci, however, surprised many by vetoing the bill, ending its chances for passing in that session. Cellucci, whom many had considered a supporter of the gay and lesbian community, said that the inclusion of unmarried heterosexual couples encouraged those straight couples to live together without marrying. This, he said, weakened the traditional family.
Also, Representative John Rogers (D-Norwood) filed the so-called Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) legislation. The bill is a constitutionally questionable, ultra-conservative reaction to the mere possibility that same-sex couples could someday win the right to marry. Had it passed, it would have prevented Massachusetts from recognizing gay and lesbian marriages if the unions were legally performed in another state. That bill was sent to a committee for study, where it rests peacefully, just about dead -- but it remains a threat should conservatives decide to resurrect it in future sessions. That would most likely happen if the Vermont high court, which is pondering a same-sex-marriage case, found in favor of the couples fighting to marry. The right wing in Massachusetts might then be able to scare the legislature into bringing DOMA back to life.

Where we are
Here's a brief overview of what is happening on Beacon Hill with three issues affecting the lesbian and gay community

Domestic partnership
In 1998, Governor Paul Cellucci vetoed the home-rule petition allowing the city of Boston to offer benefits such as health insurance to domestic partners of gay and lesbian employees. Court challenges to local domestic-partnership ordinances make it clear that statewide legislation is necessary. And to stand up in court, that legislation should not be discriminatory; in other words, those benefits should be offered to unmarried heterosexual couples as well as gay couples. Of course, that was Cellucci's reason for vetoing Boston's home-rule petition -- he did not want it to include straight couples. Currently, the statewide domestic-partnership legislation has been moved into the Senate Ways and Means Committee, putting the legislation at the starting point again. The House and the Senate must pass it before it can go back to the governor's desk.
Defense of Marriage Act
Beacon Hill supporters of the lesbian and gay community managed to squash last session's Defense of Marriage legislation. The bill was sent to the House Judiciary Committee for study, effectively taking the issue off the table. But the bill is not dead, and DOMA supporters might someday choose to put DOMA back in play and make it a threat once more.

Archaic sex laws
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts still has archaic sex laws on its books, though they are rarely enforced. Still, having those laws in existence leaves open the door to criminal prosecution of gay men and lesbians simply for having consensual sex, not to mention heterosexual couples who engage in anything more adventuresome than missionary-position intercourse. Because of the focus on domestic partnership and DOMA in recent legislative sessions, the community has devoted no energy to repealing the archaic sex laws. A bill to do so sits under study in the judiciary committee.

-- TW

In both cases, the gay and lesbian community can find encouragement -- the domestic-partnership bill was, in fact, approved by the House and Senate, and DOMA found little support. But the year's gains were not quite as dramatic as anyone hoped at the optimistic victory parties for Malia and Barrios.
Both representatives consider winning the domestic-partnership battle a major part of their job in the next year on Beacon Hill. That is, however, only one piece of their work as openly gay elected officials. As freshman state reps, they are building alliances, sometimes in unexpected places, and pushing the comfort level with gay and lesbian issues even higher in Massachusetts. But they also have work ahead of them on broader issues such as health care and affordable housing. And their daily lives are still marked by the reality that they are the only openly gay and lesbian representatives in that gold-domed building.
Two representatives are a lot better than none, however. No longer can a John Rogers propose legislation like DOMA without finding a lesbian colleague in his face asking for an explanation. That's exactly what Malia did this past session. "The Defense of Marriage piece really gave me a chance," she says. "I walked up to John Rogers on the floor and asked, `What is it?' The response was interesting. He backpedaled. `We didn't mean for it to be homophobic. My staff misunderstood it.'
"Of course," she adds, "he never withdrew it."
On the domestic-partnership front, Barrios hopes the bill allowing for statewide domestic-partner benefits, which would include an option for local governments, will make it through both the House and the Senate this session. But Cellucci has already indicated that he will veto bills that do not narrowly define the benefit recipients as gay or lesbian. And that's the problem. Such a bill, if passed by the legislature, would get Cellucci's signature but face court challenges for being discriminatory. And a bill that included heterosexual couples would earn another Cellucci veto.
The debate in 1998 over domestic partnership and DOMA did give Barrios, Malia, and other supporters of domestic-partner benefits an idea of where the lines are being drawn. That leaves them working one-on-one with legislators to understand their issues and win their votes. And the more votes, the better. "A gubernatorial veto can be overridden," Malia points out. The clock ticked down on the last session before they had the chance to go back for more votes. But next time, they'd prefer it be Cellucci with his back against the wall.
The domestic-partnership debate last year also brought the gay and lesbian community some unexpected support from the Speaker of the House, Thomas Finneran (D-Mattapan). Finneran, who has a much more conservative social base than Malia and Barrios, had usually been the one to use Cellucci's "weakening the family" line in the past. But after heavy lobbying by the lesbian and gay community -- not to mention by former state rep Susan Tracy, a friend of the Speaker's -- Finneran at the last minute cleared the way for a vote. (Tracy at the time was making what would be an unsuccessful run for Congress; she had publicly come out as a lesbian early in her campaign.) "Conversation with leadership was productive in the long run," says Malia. "There was an open door."
Barrios will not predict what the Speaker's stance will be should the issue come up again, but he says he expects the lines of communication to remain open. "I am quite certain [Finneran] will be open to discussion," Barrios says.
Barrios had defeated Alvin Thompson, a Finneran supporter, to win entrance to the legislature, but that has not seemed to work against him in his relationship with the Speaker. In fact, Finneran called personally to congratulate Barrios on the night of the representative's primary-victory party at the Cambridge Carberry's.
"I believe he is a man who operates from his head as much as from his heart," Barrios says. "Why that's important to gays and lesbians is that our stories, our lives -- the discrimination, the bias, the inequality we experience on a daily basis -- can be effectively articulated in the most human of forms. My partner does not get the same health benefits as everybody else's spouse. Those stories -- telling somebody who operates from the heart and the head, you can move them."

Both Malia and Barrios have strong roots in local politics. Malia had been a State House regular for nearly a decade in McDonough's office. A policy wonk's policy wonk, she is most energetic when talking about health care and bread-and-butter constituent issues such as community policing and after-school programs. She lives in Jamaica Plain with her partner of 26 years, Rita Kantarowski, who is director of the International Rescue Committee.
Barrios, a Florida-born 31-year-old of Cuban descent, came to the State House after working and networking his way through the Massachusetts Democratic, gay and lesbian, and Latino political communities, among others. A Harvard- and Georgetown-educated attorney, he still puts in a few hours weekly at Hill and Barlow, the downtown law firm where he practiced. He and his partner, Doug Hattaway -- who is now working for the Gore presidential campaign in New Hampshire -- own a house in Cambridge. It was Hattaway, in fact, who won Barrios the dubious honor of Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr's attention in June after the representative, following what he called "the spirit of the law," entered Hattaway's income as "spousal income" on the financial-disclosure forms that all elected officials file. The right-wing Carr, who would normally rant about someone's hiding income, had a field day with Barrios's voluntary disclosure.
"I'm an obvious target for him," said Barrios over coffee one morning last month at his familiar haunt, Carberry's. "I'm an ethnic minority. I'm a sexual minority. I have too many things he loves to bash. There's too much hate in that man to resist for very long going after someone like me."
But whatever homophobia Barrios and Malia do face these days will probably come, like the Carr column, from outside the State House. (Malia has yet to be the subject of a Carr diatribe, though "as surely as the toilet overflows," she expects it to happen eventually.) Barrios describes the legislature as a collegial scene where newly elected twenty- and thirtysomething reps network among each other and have each other over for dinner.
In fact, being one of only three Latino members of the House has put Barrios in more awkward situations than being gay has. "I have a colleague, José Santiago, another Latino, who is five foot six -- he weighs a little more than me and has a mustache and he's eight shades darker than me," says Barrios, who stands well over six feet tall. "Basically, what I'm saying is we look nothing alike. Can I tell you how many times I've been called José by my colleagues?" Even though he hails from politically correct Cambridge, Barrios takes the mistakes with a sense of humor. "Who am I to judge? I always confuse some of the old Flahertys and Walshes," he says with a chuckle.
Not everyone is so laid-back about the issue, though. Barrios recently appeared at a statewide educational conference for Latino students, where he was the last speaker after the governor and several other non-Latino elected officials. As he often does, he began his speech in Spanish before switching to English, which immediately won the crowd. But the program was running long, and after a few minutes, the MC passed Barrios a note asking him to wind up his remarks. The crowd didn't like it.
"An elderly Latino woman in the second row stood up and screamed out, `You didn't cut off any of the Anglos. Let him finish,' " Barrios recalls. Others started yelling too. Barrios had to defuse the situation by pretending he'd been about to finish anyway.

Barrios had an unexpected chance to do some outreach on gay issues last month when he was one of 20 legislators who visited Israel at the expense of a Jewish community group, the Combined Jewish Philanthropies. (The legislators took a hit from the Boston Globe, which showed ties between that organization and a lobbying group, the Jewish Community Relations Council. Legislators are limited in what they may accept from lobbyists. But the state ethics commission, before the Globe report, advised the trip participants that the trip would not violate conflict-of-interest law.)
It was on that trip that Barrios had the chance to meet Colonel John DiFava, the superintendent of the Massachusetts State Police. DiFava is putting together a working group to decide a policy on public sex in state parks.
"I want to make sure whatever policy is developed is sensitive to the gay and lesbian community and [that] we are at the table," Barrios says. Sex in cruising areas is not necessarily a legislative issue, but it has ties to one: the sex-offender registry. In its current form, the registry is supposed to include some people who are hardly child molesters -- adults arrested for having consensual sex, for example, and college students caught mooning. Barrios, though he acknowledges the need for a sex-offender registry, believes the term "sex offender" needs to be better defined.
"What it needs to be for is violent sex offenders, not for people doing victimless crimes like urinating in public or consensual sex," he says. During the legislature's last session, Barrios succeeded in having an amendment added to the bill that would have narrowed the definition of a sex offender. The House passed the amendment, but the Senate stuck with the broader version.
On the same trip to Israel, Barrios made the most of a chance opportunity to put a human face on gay and lesbian issues. The representative and a colleague -- a straight state senator whom he declines to name -- were walking down the street in Jerusalem when an attractive woman passed by. "He turned around and his eyes followed her," Barrios recalls. "He said, `Boy, she's a looker.' I said, `Does she have a brother?' He took about five seconds and he got it and he burst out laughing."
But Barrios, who also had the opportunity to speak at the newly opened Jerusalem gay and lesbian center, was not going to let it end there.
"To be openly gay when you're in Israel can be a tough row to hoe," he says. "I made him hold my hand for a block in downtown Jerusalem." Barrios adds that the senator made it for half a block before pulling his hand away.
Suffice it to say, that senator will likely think twice next time an issue affecting gays and lesbians makes it to the State House floor. "It was an incredibly educational experience for him to have walked in the shoes of this group that is less equal in the eyes of society," Barrios says. "That's what I can do. I can lobby people on policy issues. But unless I've touched them as a friend who is gay, unless I've been able to win their vote on our cause . . . trying to get their vote on domestic partnership or DOMA is never going to be a sincere conversation. The difference is the moral impact of being part of that suspect class."

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