{"id":13833,"date":"2011-09-15T11:40:06","date_gmt":"2011-09-15T15:40:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2011\/09\/15\/13833.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T19:00:02","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T00:00:02","slug":"news-of-the-day-a-couple-of-da","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2011\/09\/15\/news-of-the-day-a-couple-of-da\/","title":{"rendered":"News of the day (a couple of days ago)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Pedro Segarra won the Democratic Primary for Hartford’s Mayoralty this week, pretty much guaranteeing him re-election in November. Take a look at the story in the Courant<\/i>: Segarra Wins Democratic Mayoral Primary<\/a>. Seriously, scan through that article by the Courant’s<\/i> Jenna Carlesso, because what I am writing about is what isn’t in that article. It’s in his official bio<\/a> and it’s in his campaign site bio<\/a>—it’s not a secret, it’s just not newsworthy.\n

Mayor Segarra is gay. And it’s not newsworthy.\n

In fact, I believe that Pedro Segarra is the first large-city mayor who is in a legal same-sex marriage.\n

Digression<\/i>: the phrasing there is terrible, but it’s an awkward sort of record. The colloquial way to phrase it is that Mayor Segarra is the first legally gay-married<\/i> big-city mayor, but I frankly dislike the gay-married<\/i> colloquialism. I first typed that Mayor Segarra was the first big-city mayor to be married to a man, but of course that isn’t true, and then rephrased it that he was the first big-city mayor to be a man married to a man, although as far as I know there are no big-city mayors who are women married to women and I wanted to include such marriages and mayors in the category (as they should be). Then I typed that Mayor Segarra was the first big-city mayor to be married to his own sex, which is far worse than what I actually went with up there. Hmph. Suggestions for improving the wording gratefully appreciated, but I guess I need to give up and use gay-married<\/i>. End Digression.\n

Anyway, Mayor Segarra advanced to the Mayor’s office last summer, he was already the first openly gay Mayor in the city’s history and one of only a few gay big-city Mayors in the country. The next day, he married his boyfriend, and made history—except that nobody noticed or cared. OK, that’s not true, but it’s surprisingly close to being true. The Mayor of Hartford married his long-term boyfriend, and it wasn’t a scandal, or a controversy, or anything like that. Out here in the suburb, almost a mile from the borderline, I barely noticed. Of course, it was a trifle overshadowed by the previous Mayor being convicted on felony counts, but still, there were articles about the new guy, and I don’t remember anybody making a fuss about him being gay, or about him getting married.\n

And when you are talking about society and culture, I think there’s a difference between being Mayor and being elected<\/i> Mayor; there was somewhat of a history of women being appointed to elective office before they were elected to it, which was revealing about the world they were in. Similarly, it was possible (and I suppose still technically is possible) that our city would stand for a gay appointed Mayor in an emergency, but that given an election, would just happen to choose somebody straight. Didn’t happen.\n

I don’t read the Advocate<\/i> any more, and I am well out of touch on a lot of gay rights issues. I think I get a lot of the headlines and the most talked-about stories through my network of friends, but of course I don’t know what I am missing, by the nature of it. So I’ll ask GR’s: is Mayor Segarra a gay hero? An icon of political success? If not, why not? Isn’t it newsworthy that all of this isn’t newsworthy?\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger also notes that the local paper has admirably refrained from coy locutions about the Mayor’s Spouse being the First Whatever of the City.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19413,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13833\/revisions\/19413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}