Cicilline Poised to
be Openly Gay
Mayor of Large
US City

Providence would surpass Tempe, AZ as the largest US city with an openly gay Mayor

PROVIDENCE, R.I. - This sleepy New England town is poised to be the largest U.S. city to elect an openly gay mayor.
He is also setting the stage for Providence to become the first state capital to elect an openly gay candidate.

Recent polls show him with a commanding lead over three other contenders in the race to succeed Vincent “Buddy” Cianci Jr., an old-school pol who held office for parts of four decades before he was sentenced to five years in prison for corruption. Cianci was a Roman Catholic in a heavily Catholic city and used to squire beautiful women around town.

“It’s a fluke of history,” says Brown University political science professor Darrell West. “David came along at a time when people were looking for something different. David is different from Buddy Cianci in just about every way.”

The 41-year-old son of the state’s best-known organized crime lawyer, Cicilline has tried not to be known as “the gay candidate.” That led some in the gay community to revolt during the recent primary and back his chief opponent, former Mayor Joseph Paolino Jr.

“There are a couple of people who think I haven’t stressed my sexual orientation strongly enough during the campaign,” says Cicilline, a four-term state legislator. “I just don’t think it’s relevant. I’m running for mayor of Providence to represent all the people of this city.”
If he is elected, Providence (population 174,000) will surpass Tempe, Ariz. (pop. 158,000), as the largest U.S. city with an openly gay mayor, according to the Washington-based Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund.
The Victory Fund, which helped raise money for Cicilline, says he has shown gay candidates can appeal to a broad spectrum of voters.

“David’s sexual orientation should define him no more and no less than the community he lives in or his ethnic or religious background,” says Victory Fund spokesman Jason Young.

Cicilline emerged from a four-way Democratic primary, beating his nearest opponent, Paolino, by 20 points. As for the November election, a Brown University poll released Tuesday found that 70 percent of those surveyed favor Cicilline, while his three opponents were in the single digits.

Cicilline is a Providence native and a graduate of Brown, where he co-founded the College Democrats with two classmates — the late John F. Kennedy Jr., and William Mondale, son of former Vice President Walter Mondale.
“He was smart and politically savvy even then,” says West, who taught Cicilline at Brown in 1982. “He had star written all over him.”

As a legislator, Cicilline fought for issues that were important to liberal East Side voters and the gay community: mandatory AIDS ( news - web sites) education in schools, adding sexual orientation to the state’s hate-crimes law, establishing a hypodermic needle exchange.
His mayoral campaign has tried to broaden his appeal. He put his campaign headquarters in predominantly black and Hispanic South Providence, and has relentlessly sounded a message of better schools, safer neighborhoods and a City Hall free of corruption.

He says that he has received a handful of anti-gay and anti-Jewish letters but that most voters appear to have ignored or embraced his sexual orientation.

“Most voters make their decision based on the quality of your character and the strength of your ideas, not on your race or religion or gender or sexual orientation,”