Fake last name, fake marriage and fake everything.
Bill de Blasio became the mayor of New York City largely because his interracial kids made videos on his behalf, catapulting him from a packed field of aspiring politicians during the Democrat primary.
But there was always an obvious question about his marriage.
Are you still a lesbian?
That was one question lobbed at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, during a Facebook question-and-answer session hosted by the website Mic.
Ms. McCray, who was taped taking questions from the public in advance of a live session next Tuesday, did not say “no.”
Instead, the first lady visibly rolled her eyes and shook her head. She moved on to the next question.
Ms. McCray, a poet and activist, has been married to Mr. de Blasio for 21 years but once identified as a lesbian. In a 1979 magazine essay that was first unearthed by the Observer shortly before Mr. de Blasio ran for mayor, Ms. McCray described in detail her experiences as a lesbian.
The essay was frankly titled “I am a Lesbian.”
Now that Bill de Blasio’s career is over, so is his marriage.
Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray are separating. They are not planning to divorce, they said, but will date other people. They will continue to share the Park Slope townhouse where they raised their two children, now in their 20s — the vinyl-sided hub of a thoroughly modern political family whose mixed-race symbolism helped send a spindly progressive long shot to City Hall
So nothing is going to change except that they no longer have a need to pretend for the public?
De Blasio is widely hated and his political career is over. So why even write about him? It’s a good question, not just for me, but for the New York Times. Why does the paper choose to run a splashy puff piece on the breakup of a political marriage that allows De Blasio and McCray to spin this their way?
Tales of the candidate’s courtship of Ms. McCray — when both worked for David N. Dinkins, the city’s first Black mayor — only accentuated Mr. de Blasio’s persistence: Ms. McCray, who had identified as a lesbian and seemed cool to his overtures, relented eventually.
Oh. Is gay and lesbian now just something you “identify” as? I thought it was a permanent state of being which is why conversion therapy was banned. But apparently, when convenient, you can go in and out.
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.”
That’s as close as the old gray lady (the paper) gets to discussing the obvious.
What’s the obvious? That the difference between Bill de Blasio and George Santos is in the kind of coverage they get from the New York Times.
De Blasio and McCray have an arrangement that had proved to be convenient for them both. It also seems to have yielded some kids. Now that the political career is over, they still have an arrangement but without the need to lie about it except to the New York Times. I wonder how much of the nightmarish De Blasio era could have been avoided if the paper had told even the barest minimum of truth about the politician who misled about everything from his last name to his marriage.