De Blasio\'s Wife Gives Candid Interview

Ben Baker/Essence A photograph of Chirlane McCray, the wife of Bill de Blasio, a Democratic candidate for mayor, that accompanies an interview with Ms. McCray in the June issue of Essence magazine.

The New York City mayor's race has failed to attract much attention in the glossy world of national magazines, save for a handful of soft-focus features about Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker, who would be the first woman and first openly gay person to run City Hall.

Now Bill de Blasio, the public advocate and one of Ms. Quinn's Democratic rivals, has earned some prominent ink - albeit in the form of an interview with his wife, Chirlane McCray, which appears in next month's issue of Essence, the same magazine where, in 1979, she wrote a seven-page essay about being an openly gay black woman.

Identified as “the woman who could be the first lady of New York City,” Ms. McCray, 58, appears in two photographs, one alongside her husband in a campaign office. She speaks candidly about the intersection of her personal and political lives, describing herself and Mr. de Blasio as “a very conventional, unconventional couple.”

Falling in love with Mr. de Blasio, whom she met in 1991 while working in City Hall, meant “putting aside assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in,” Ms. McCray says, and she concedes that it felt a bit strange to realize after years of exclusively dating women that she was drawn to a man.

“I thought, ‘Whoa, what is this?'” Ms. McCray says. “But I also didn't think, ‘Oh, now I'm attracted to men.' I felt attracted to Bill. He felt like the perfect person for me.”

Was it a concern for a gay, black woman to start dating a straight, white man? “All I could think was, ‘He's six years younger than me!'” Ms. McCray recalls.

Mr. de Blasio, of Brooklyn, has pitched himself to voters as the full-throated progressive candidate of a crowded Democratic field. His family, including Ms. McCray and the couple's two teenage children, has taken a prominent role in his campaign; when he stood with them to declare his candidacy in January, some New Yorkers focused on the afro of his son, Dante, which The Daily News called “stupendous.”

After The New York Observer reported in December that Ms. McCray had previously identified as gay, The New York Post ran an editorial cartoon that depicted her and her husband both wearing women's lingerie; in Essence, Ms. McCray calls the cartoon “racist, ignorant, and crude.”

Ms. McCray, a former speechwriter for David N. Dinkins, who has worked as a writer and editor, says in the interview that she came out as a lesbian at 19 and “hadn't really dated any men” before she met Mr. de Blasio. He was aware of her past history, she says, but her 1970s essay in Essence “shook him up.”

“He didn't show it,” Ms. McCray adds. “He was cool about it.”

When the interviewer, Linda Villarosa, asks if Ms. McCray considers herself bisexual, she rejects the term, saying, “Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins. Finding the right person can be so hard that, often, when a person finally finds someone she or he is comfortable with, she or he just makes it work.”

Asked if she is still attracted to women, Ms. McCray laughs. “I'm married, I'm monogamous, but I'm not dead,” she says, adding: “And Bill isn't either.”