Coming out of the political closet

On Tuesday 2, Illinois will hold its gayest election ever.

On the ballot is an unprecedented number of lesbian and gay candidates. Fourteen, to be exact—one for U.S. Senate, one for state Senate, seven for state House of Representatives, four for Cook County races and one for the Appellate Court—according to Equality Illinois, which orchestrated a meet and greet with most of the LGBT contenders on January 19 at Boystown bar Sidetrack. “Not just a bar,” Ed Mullen, candidate for state rep in the 11th District, told us. “The first gay bar in Chicago that had glass front doors.” For close to two hours, the bumping stereo system went silent; each candidate was given a mike and just three minutes to make his or her plea to a tightly packed crowd that included Sidetrack regulars and wonks from the Lesbian and Gay Bar Association of Chicago.

Candidates taking the dais mostly agreed that there needs to be more diverse voices at the legislative and judicial tables, that their sexual orientation lends them an outsider or underdog outlook politically and that LGBT rights such as marriage equality need to be pushed harder on both state and federal levels. (State Rep. Greg Harris, chief sponsor of the Marriage Equality Bill that’s awaiting a vote by the full House, spent his three minutes discussing Illinois’s $13 billion budget deficit.)

But there was nothing close to consensus when it came to explaining the sudden abundance of gay and lesbian candidates.

“It was political action that brought us to a place where two gay candidates are running against each other,” said Joe Laiacona, a fetish author (pen name: Jack Rinella) and columnist at LeatherViews.com who’s running a heated race against incumbent Deb Mell for state rep in the 40th District. (Harris and Mell are the only out members of the Illinois General Assembly.) After his speech, we asked Laiacona if he worried being a leather fetishist would help his opponent win the straight vote. “What are they going to do?” he said, chuckling and sipping a cocktail. “Figure out who’s less gay?”

As he greeted enthusiastic supporters in one of Sidetrack’s quieter barrooms, Jim Madigan, who’s seeking the state Senate seat in the 7th District, credited Barack Obama’s victory with renewing the LGBT community’s faith in politics. “The Obama phenomenon has given a lot of us the sense that the political process can be used effectively, that people can grassroots organize and have an impact as so many did for the Obama campaign.” The sheer number of out candidates, Madigan added, signals a point of maturity in the evolution of the gay community. “Instead of waiting for the community to anoint one person we all have to come out for,” he told us, “there are more gay people like me exercising some independence.”

“I recently asked [gay U.S. Senate candidate] Jacob Meister if any of us ten years ago would’ve tried to run for Senate as an out candidate,” Joanne Fehn, candidate for Cook County Circuit Court judge, told us. “Probably not! It just would’ve been too much of an uphill battle.”

Nationally, the gay rights movement has suffered some major defeats since the last election. Prop 8, the ballot measure that reversed marriage rights for same-sex couples in California, was passed in November 2008. And since November of ’09, gay-marriage opponents have had their way in Maine, New York and New Jersey. “Those losses hurt a lot,” Mullen said. “There’s now a strong sense that in order to get the rights that we deserve, we need to stand up and take them for ourselves.”

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