Was Chirlane McCray, Bill de Blasio’s estranged wife, lesbian before marrying ex-New York mayor?

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Wednesday that he and his wife Chirlane McCray, are separating.

In an interview with The New York Times, de Blasio and McCray made it clear that they did not plan to divorce right away. Instead, they would continue living together for the time being in their Brooklyn townhouse. They will, however, open up their relationship and begin dating other people outside of their marriage.

“Even at this moment of change, this is a love story,” de Blasio said in a tweet linking to the Times interview. The couple also admitted to the fact that Blasio’s political career and ambitions, including his short-lived 2020 presidential campaign and his seven-year tenure as mayor had been difficult on their relationship.

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De Blasio added that he also had some initial doubts about going into a relationship with McCray, as she had once publicly identified herself as a lesbian. “For the guy who took the chance on a woman who was an out lesbian and wrote an article called ‘I Am a Lesbian,’ 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,” he said in the interview.

Was Chirlane McCray lesbian?

The couple met for the first time while working for the late former New York Mayor David Dinkins. They got married in 1994.

A decade before meeting her now-estranged husband, in 1979, McCray wrote the article brought up by de Blasio in the NYT interview. She wrote it for Essence Magazine. “I discovered my preference for women early, before getting locked into a traditional marriage and having children,” McCray wrote at the time in the article.

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Years after she married de Blasio, in an interview with the same magazine in 2013, McCray said that she and the politician fell in love by “putting aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in.” By then, she had been married to de Blasio for almost 2 decades. The couple share two children: Dante, who graduated from Yale University in 2019, and Chiara, who is a student at Santa Clara University in California.

When McCray was asked if she was bisexual, she refused to confirm a label. “I am more than just a label,” she said. “Why are people so driven to labeling where we fall on the sexual spectrum? Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins.”