While marching in the Gay Pride Parade in 1998, local State Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell (D-69th district) was asked, “Are you really gay?”
O’Donnell—who at the time had set out on his first run for public office—had to bring over his partner “and make out with him in front of ten or fifteen people” just to prove it, he told a circle of students gathered for a Thursday evening event sponsored by Barnard’s LGBT group, Q.
Although he lost the election for state Senate that year, O’Donnell ran successfully for the Assembly in 2002, representing Manhattan’s Upper West Side from 85th to 125th Streets. By 2007, he helped advance a bill to legalize gay marriage in New York by an 85-61 Assembly vote.
O’Donnell—one of four gay members of the State Legislature—charmed the crowd with his yarns. “I’m Irish. I tell stories. It’s what I do,” he said. But O’Donnell’s tales were more than quaint anecdotes, resonating with the students who surrounded him in Barnard Hall’s Sulzberger Parlor. He spoke candidly about how he “learned to love from a man,” feels “dejected” at times amidst his colleagues, and how “as a person of size, and a person who is very hairy, I would often feel uncomfortable going places” because he didn’t fit into the gay stereotype.
In the fall of 2005, O’Donnell graced the cover of Bear magazine, though he admitted he’s spent his life trying anything—grapefruit, spaghetti, Weight Watchers—to shed the physique that ultimately landed him in the gay quarterly.
Humor—explained the brother of comedian Rosie O’Donnell—has been his key to “diffuse things” throughout his life, from being pigeonholed as an LGBT politician to the complications of having a famous sister with “a big mouth.”
Yet Q leader Natalie Wittlin, BC ’09, said, “He’s warm, and he’s friendly, and he’s also very good at getting the job done.”
After O’Donnell and his partner, now of 28 years, were plaintiffs in the New York State Court of Appeals case that declined their right to wed, he became the prime sponsor of the Gender Expression Non-Discrimination Act that passed through the Assembly. Though the Republican majority in the state Senate kept this bill off the table for final passage in 2007, the current Democratic leadership has opened up new promise for O’Donnell. Just as he did then, O’Donnell vowed to push for the state to legalize gay marriage. His strategy still is, as it was, to challenge the “no” votes on both political and personal grounds. For the latter, “it’s those conversations that are the most difficult,” he said.
Still, O’Donnell said of gay marriage “I don’t think, in the end, to most people, that this really matters,” explaining that most—especially the youth generation—understand that “you can’t choose who you love.”
When Hillary Clinton left her Senate seat from New York to become Secretary of State, O’Donnell was among the contenders to replace her. Though he said Governor David Paterson, CC ’77, would “have to drink a very strong cup of coffee the day he picked me ... I pushed open the door for other gay people to hold that office.”
Politically minded Brandon Storm, CC ’12, was inspired by the assemblyman’s talk, and may follow in O’Donnell’s footsteps by running for public office someday. “It’s very encouraging to see gay politicians,” he said. “There aren’t a lot and we could have come farther at this point.”
Still, said O’Donnell, there’s a burden that comes with being a gay role model in politics. “Every person who is gay and has a problem calls my office,” he said—even if they aren’t his constituents. He said that he asks, “Why are you calling me?” to which they reply, “Because we’re gay.”
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