Irreconcilable Differences

The Massachusetts Statehouse, across from the Boston Common on Beacon Hill, has seen its share of history. Sen. John F. Kennedy gave his farewell address to Massachusetts voters there as he departed for Washington in 1961, the first Catholic to win the presidency.

But it is doubtful that the Statehouse, completed in 1798, has ever hosted an event that joined politics and religion like the one that Patrick Guerriero, a candidate for lieutenant governor, attended on Jan. 15, 2002.

The acting governor, Jane Swift, was about to give the State of the State address, with an eye toward keeping her job in the November election. But her reputation was eroding with disclosures that she had deployed state workers to baby-sit her daughter. It did not help that the two jets that had flown into the World Trade Center towers four months earlier took off from Boston--a historic lapse of security on her watch.

In the audience, among other dignitaries there to lend gravitas to the occasion, sat Cardinal Bernard Law, archbishop of Boston, who was embroiled in a scandal involving a cover-up of sexual abuse by priests in his diocese.

Another intriguing character in this scene was Guerriero, the intense, doe-eyed son of an immigrant bricklayer, the product of Catholic schools and suburban politics, and a walking contradiction. Years before, as a graduate student, Guerriero had lunched with House Speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr. “Let me get this straight,” O’Neill had said. “You’re the son of an immigrant, you’re Catholic, you’re from Massachusetts and you’re a Republican?” When Guerriero nodded, O’Neill murmured to no one in particular, “Where the hell did we go wrong?”

As cameras focused on the chamber’s podium, Guerriero joined the guests in the front row. What on earth, onlookers wondered, could the first openly gay candidate for state office possibly be saying to Cardinal Law? Guerriero smiled to himself. What he said to his old friend was this: “I’m praying for you during these difficult days.”

Within a year, Swift bowed out of the race, Law was forced to resign and Guerriero left Massachusetts for Washington to run the Log Cabin Republicans, the nation’s top political organization for gay conservatives. He had no idea that the career move would put him at the center of a wrenching national debate over gay marriage, that he would face off with a GOP administration leaning harder than ever to the right, that he would ultimately borrow strategies from the evangelical movement, of all things, to build support for gay issues. He was 34 years old.

Guerriero was charged with building the strength of an organization that had long been viewed by more muscular liberal gay groups as the Uncle Tom of the movement, a weak apologist representing a minority of the gay population. The Log Cabin Republicans had endorsed Bob Dole for president in 1996 even after he returned a $1,000 campaign contribution for fear that accepting it would alienate mainstream Republicans.

“Absolutely, we were looking for somebody to take us to the next chapter,” recalls William Brownson, chairman of the group’s board of directors.

Opportunities to do just that came early--and often. Looking back, Guerriero describes the hectic year leading up to the 2004 presidential election as a “perfect storm to create a culture war,” with both cold and warm winds blowing.

In April 2003, Republican Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania compared homosexuality to bigamy, polygamy, incest and adultery. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the anti-sodomy law in Texas. In November, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decreed that excluding same-sex couples from marriage violated the state constitution.

And in December, Guerriero went to a Christmas party at the White House. The president was there. White House political strategist Karl Rove was there. Guerriero talked to them both. He thanked Bush for uniting the nation after Sept. 11 and then asked him not to divide the country over the issue of gay marriage, to leave the Constitution alone. “He was gracious, as he always is,” Guerriero says. “But I walked away realizing that this issue was not going away.” He then buttonholed Rove. Surely he could engineer a reelection without alienating the 1 million gays and lesbians who had voted for Bush over Al Gore?

“The impression I got in the room that night was that the polling made it a very easy political decision [to run against gays], and the only question was whether the president would have the stomach for it,” Guerriero recalls.

As 2004 unfolded, Bush began to distance himself from his gay constituents--he gleaned an estimated 25% of the gay vote in 2000, slipping to 23% in 2004--and more solidly embraced the 4 million evangelicals whom Rove believed had stayed home four years earlier, making the 2000 election a cliffhanger.

In mid-February, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom opened the door for California state marriage licenses to be issued “without regard to gender or sexual orientation.” Within days, homosexual couples swarmed City Hall, providing striking images for the media and political red meat for the religious right.

Guerriero remembers first hearing the news about San Francisco while riding in a D.C. taxicab and thinking, “How amazing,” and in the next breath, “Holy . . . “ On a personal level, he and the Log Cabin staff felt excited for the couples seeking the sanctions of law and the blessings of marriage. But as political strategists, “we feared the harshest political backlash,” he recalls.

On Feb. 24, Guerriero took a cellphone call from Log Cabin’s political director. It was Christopher Barron’s first day on the job. He told Guerriero that President Bush was about to support a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. “It felt like someone kicking me in the stomach,” Guerriero says.

Back at the office, in a second-story walk-up in Dupont Circle, he watched Bush make his statement on TV. By then, Guerriero had come to believe in gay marriage because civil unions convey neither its privileges, such as spousal Social Security benefits, nor its legal and financial responsibilities, such as shouldering a deceased partner’s debt. What he saw as an election-year tactic to propel social conservatives to the polls horrified him as a conservative and politicized him as a homosexual.

He urged the Log Cabin Republicans to issue a response calling the president’s decision “a declaration of war” against gays and lesbians. They had turned the other cheek when Dole returned Log Cabin’s campaign contribution. They had endorsed George W. Bush in 2000, touting his record as a compassionate conservative. Enough. For the first time in its 27-year history, the group was bucking a Republican president.

A few weeks later, Log Cabin unveiled a $1 million television ad campaign targeted at swing states that featured a clip of Vice President Dick Cheney, whose daughter Mary is a lesbian, defending an individual’s right to choose their sexual preference. It generated a lot of buzz in advertising circles, a lot of heat at the White House, and struck a nerve with gay Republicans. Money poured in.

In April, hundreds of gays and lesbians converged in Palm Springs for Log Cabin’s annual convention, giving Guerriero face time with some of the 10,000-plus members who until then had been at the other end of phone calls or e-mails. These were conservatives, and Guerriero feared a backlash from loyalists who put the war on terrorism and the drive for tax relief above all. Instead he found a gusher of emotion. “Even among the most pro-Bush conservatives, there was a deep anger at the president,” Guerriero says. He returned to Washington a bit shaken, realizing a showdown with the White House was inevitable.

In July, the Log Cabin Republicans joined other gay and lesbian groups to defeat the Federal Marriage Amendment in the Senate. A month later, Log Cabin went to the GOP Convention in New York City, preaching inclusion. In a first-ever coalition, they joined forces with pro-choice Republicans to urge the platform committee to incorporate language saying that Republicans disagree on some social issues. But the scheme boomeranged, provoking the far right not only to reject the unity plank, but to insert new, harsh language condemning same-sex marriage and civil unions.

Reporters pounced. News stories highlighted the party’s use of moderates, such as California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, to soften its image on prime-time TV while it excluded gays in its platform. Barron called Guerriero in Washington.

“What now?” he asked.

“Tell them you can’t put lipstick on a pig,” Guerriero said.

“I can say that?” Barron asked.

Guerriero assured him that he could.

CNN’s Bob Franken later told Barron the channel had run the “You can’t put lipstick on a pig” clip so frequently that viewers complained. When “Meet the Press” host Tim Russert asked Giuliani about it, the mayor quipped, “Which one am I, the lipstick or the pig?”

After the convention, the Log Cabin Republicans’ 24-member board voted not to endorse the president. As Guerriero had said since March, “We will not remain silent as gay and lesbian families are used as wedge issues to divide America. Loyalty doesn’t mean checking one’s principles at the door.”

The board also opted against holding a press conference. Vindictive was not the Guerriero way, never had been.

“Guerriero” means “warrior” in Latin. Patrick learned that in the library at Jesuit-run Boston College High School, where he was a star on the soccer field and on the dance floor.

“Patrick went to a million proms. He was the generic prom date--nice, fun, presentable,” recalls his mother, Sandra Theodor, a psychiatric social worker.

He was also a political junkie. She bribed him to do his chores by offering to let him read the newspapers. After Catholic University in Washington, D.C., where as student body president he met and became friends with board member Cardinal Law, Guerriero went to Boston College for a master’s degree in political science. He kept his opinions to himself.

“He never once tried to persuade students to [accept] his views,” says Bill Schneider, Guerriero’s former professor and now a CNN political analyst. “I was surprised to learn he was a Republican.”

While in graduate school, Guerriero helped run a mayoral campaign in his hometown of Melrose, a community of nearly 30,000 outside Boston. He then left school to run for a seat in the state Legislature, and won--an improbable victory for a Republican, but one facilitated by corruption scandals involving two Democratic predecessors. He returned home to serve as mayor of Melrose, but when Massachusetts Gov. Paul Cellucci resigned to become U.S. ambassador to Canada in 2001, Jane Swift ascended to acting governor and asked Guerriero to join her as deputy. Later, running for a term in her own right, she tapped him as her running mate.

But before all of that, Guerriero had to square his history with his future. A Republican from Massachusetts was an oddity. A Catholic Republican, rare. But a gay Catholic Republican from Massachusetts? A conundrum. He had to come out to his family.

First was his mother. He sat her down in the kitchen, beneath a Salvador Dali sketch of a crucifixion, soon after graduating from Catholic University. “What I recall, I am somewhat ashamed to say, was anger,” Theodor says. “I had no homophobic feelings, it was just a feeling that my life was going to be turned upside down. Or maybe the anger was a defense for other things--I was terrified about AIDS, I was worried about what his father was going to say, and I wondered about the church.”

These days she is fiercely proud, and protective, of his career. “I’ve come to love his being gay as who my child is,” she says. “I could not imagine what has happened since.”

Of all the people Guerriero would tell, the reaction of only one really worried him. His father, Pat Guerriero, came to America at age 16 from Avellino, Italy, and made his living as a mason. “My father blew me away,” says Melissa Guerriero Wyland, Patrick’s sister. “You would expect him to turn his back. He’s a traditional Italian father. And he was really amazing. He was really accepting and proud. And if my dad can do that, any dad can.”

Later, when Patrick was running for lieutenant governor, the Boston Globe printed a photo of father and son sitting side by side, working the phones.

In his first run for the state Legislature, Guerriero wore out the pavement. “I knocked on a thousand doors of houses, walking up stoops that my father had built,” he says.

In the Legislature, he rallied a tiny Republican minority to tilt the speaker’s race toward the more moderate Democrat, improving his access and ability to deliver for his district. In five years, he did not miss a vote. Guerriero neither advertised nor hid his homosexuality.

“I chose to be defined by my work,” he says, then with a hint of resentment adds, “Nobody comes out as a straight.”

When the man for whom he had campaigned years earlier retired as mayor of Melrose, Guerriero could not resist. Again he campaigned door to door. Again he won handily--at age 29.

“I don’t think there’s a more intense job in America than being mayor of a small town,” he says. “It is the most hands-on, most personal, most life-consuming job imaginable.”

Guerriero schedules our interview in the lobby of his apartment building, away from the hubbub of the Log Cabin offices. When he arrives, his anxiety is visible. He has slept poorly. He does not enjoy the introspection that an interview will require.

But once he begins to talk, Guerriero relaxes. He says he envisions 20 years of amendments and repeals and debates before Americans understand that homosexuals are simply born that way. He even foresees a day when the Log Cabin Republicans will disband.

“We don’t need a never-ending gay and lesbian bureaucracy,” he says. “I do believe that a couple of decades from now we’re going to look back and say, ‘Did we really have this crazy debate about two people loving each other and wanting to spend their lives together and pay the bills so the government doesn’t have to?’ ”

But for now Guerriero faces a GOP administration that is hard-wired to the hard right. To build broader support, he is keen on borrowing the grass-roots approach of the evangelical movement--”organizing the hard way in places like Kentucky and South Carolina and Montana.” His other short-term strategies include amassing collective influence by aligning with other moderate Republican groups on unrelated topics, such as stem cell research, and reaching out to conservatives on some issues. Social Security reform, for instance, would allow gay Americans to set up personal savings accounts that they could bequeath to their partners. “Behind the scenes there is a growing movement from the theocrats to the core Republicans,” Guerriero says. “I know it’s not going to happen overnight. But within five or 10 years, I think you’ll see a mini civil war within the party.”

Meanwhile, Guerriero dodges questions about his future. Some speculate that he will return to Massachusetts--where his boyfriend, Louie Kerbici, lives--to run for office, perhaps governor. There is talk that mainstream gay organizations will recruit him to bolster their conservative credentials in a town where the White House, the Senate and the House are all in Republican hands. Or perhaps he will stay put. He does not join in the speculation. It’s another place where Guerriero will not go.

“His wall is really high,” says his sister Melissa. “Sometimes he’ll put a trampoline over it so I can jump up. I think this year has added some more bricks.”

William Brownson, chairman of the Log Cabin board, has noticed it too. “He’s clearly given some thought to boundary management,” Brownson says. “Clearly Patrick can make a difference, and he knows it. What he may not know is the magnitude of the difference he can make.”

During this year’s inaugural festivities, Log Cabin held an invitation-only party. Sen. Gordon Smith, a Republican from Oregon, gave a speech, wildly applauded, saying the future of gay rights would be decided in the GOP. “The work on the left is already done,” he said.

Guerriero agrees. The drama is only at intermission.