THE LONG ROAD TO THE GOP.

Daniel Stewart took many detours on his way to becoming a gay Republican mayor

If you were a student at Cumberland High School in Cumberland, R.I., in 1980, you would definitely remember your prom. That was the year Aaron Fricke successfully sued the school for the right to take another boy to the event. Less memorable, perhaps, would have been the hordes of hecklers--which included Daniel Stewart, today the first openly gay mayor of the small town of Plattsburgh, N.Y. "I was against them," the mayor chuckles sheepishly, "being the big closeted person I was."

Though Stewart has yet to make amends for his high school wrong (he has tried unsuccessfully to find Fricke to apologize), the two ensuing decades have brought him to a place he never could have imagined that senior spring. Today, Stewart is a rising GOP star, one of a handful of gay Republicans to meet last April with Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush, whom Stewart has endorsed. And he is the first openly gay mayor in New York State. Clearly Stewart has not taken the usual path to office.

Upon graduating from high school in 1980, Stewart joined the Air Force. Though closeted, Stewart says he "found more gays in the military than I had in the private sector." Throughout the nearly eight years of his service, Stewart grappled with his sexual identity and a drug and alcohol problem that, he acknowledges, stemmed from being "unable to accept who I was."

At 26 he left the military and found recovery. "I knew that if I stayed in, I would eventually have a problem with the gay issue," Stewart says, "and the last thing I wanted was humiliation. I was trying to come to terms with my sexuality." It took some time, but "when I finally came out and said I was gay," Stewart says, "life became [easier]. Recovery became [easier]." In December he will celebrate 12 years of sobriety.

It was the Air Force that brought Stewart to Plattsburgh, population 19,000, including 6,000 students at the State University of New York. When he left the military he joined a trucking company and drove for the firm from 1989 until 1993, when the company abruptly dissolved. But if there was one thing life on the road prepared him for, it was politics. Hours upon hours in his cab he listened to the radio. "It keeps you updated on national issues," Stewart says.

And during his transition toward a new life out of the closet, Stewart changed something else: his party affiliation. After registering to vote in 1980 as a Republican and remaining with the party throughout his military service, by the early '90s Stewart was disenchanted with Reagan's party. That was the time, Stewart says, "when the rhetoric of the Republican Party had turned so antigay" and the failures of Republican AIDS policies had become too hard to overlook.

Then it was 1993, and Stewart was not only not a Republican but also a candidate for Plattsburgh's city council--on the Democratic ticket.

"Here I was," says Stewart, laughing, "the openly gay unemployed truck driver who had dressed up in a condom outfit for an ACT UP rally. And I was always in the Letters to the Editor section on gay issues." But in his bid for office, Stewart was already separating the personal from the political. "My commitment to [the Democratic Party] was, I'm not getting into public office to be the `gay icon' of Plattsburgh; I'm getting in here to make where we live better, to work on the issues of everybody." (Although he is the first to admit his issues aren't "strictly gay," before he made his bid for city council he promoted a nondiscrimination bill that the mayor subsequently introduced and passed.) He won that first election easily. He ran and won again in both 1995 and 1997. In 1997 Stewart began having ideological differences with Democratic mayor Clyde Rabideau and abandoned the party in 1998. (The problem, Stewart says, was an "issue of control and toeing the line.")

Not long before, Stewart encountered the Log Cabin Republicans at a celebration for the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center's 25th anniversary. A Log Cabin representative spoke, Stewart recalls, and members of the audience hissed.

"It was the liberal-left, extremist Democratic activist types that just hated a gay Republican," Stewart says. "I thought that was rather unfair." Not to mention the fact that he was realizing that in certain areas--military policy, fiscal conservatism--he agreed with the GOP. After a few months he changed his party affiliation again.

"My concerns of 1992 [with the GOP] were gone; the rhetoric was changing," Stewart says. "There was moderation." Plus, joining the Log Cabin Republicans meant an opportunity to change the party from within.

When he rejoined the GOP in May 1998, Stewart said he had no plans of seeking to oust the mayor, a five-term incumbent and a Democrat. One year later Stewart announced he was leaving politics--and the United States--for a partner who lived in Montreal.

But the Republican Party had different ideas for him. Party officials, including New York governor George Pataki, were nudging Stewart toward the mayoral race. By June 1999, Stewart had "put Montreal on hold." Though he got into the race late (as of September, he was polling 30 points behind the incumbent), Stewart says his "futuristic talk" appealed to the electorate. His opponent, he says, "was talking about the past and not about the future. The gay issue wasn't even an issue."

Stewart raised $37,000 and received the endorsement of Governor Pataki and the Empire State Pride Agenda, a statewide gay political group. And then on November 2 he received 50.6% of the over 5,300 votes cast, then had to wait for absentee ballots before officially being declared the winner.

"I'd like to be mayor at least four years" he says, admitting he may eventually set his sights higher than the mayor's office. "I think society is changing, and as it changes, as people moderate their views and have less fear of homosexuality, I think we'll be able to move higher."

Still, Stewart believes the media have made too big a deal out of his sexual orientation. While he thinks it is important to elect gay and lesbian politicians, he admits he has some fairly conservative feelings about public versus private life. He did not, for example, bring his partner to his inauguration.

When you elect gays and lesbians in a place like Plattsburgh, says Stewart, "people see we are just the same as them. We pay the taxes. We wax our car the same way. We walk our dogs. It's very seldom I have a negative attitude toward me based on sexual orientation. And it's because I do not go out and throw this in people's faces."

As a result, says Stewart, don't expect him to be pushing the envelope on gay issues, despite his visibility. "I'm not Ellen," he says. "I'm not going to go on TV and start kissing my partner for everyone to see on the 6 o'clock news. I don't think it's appropriate, because I don't want to see half the people in this city kissing their spouses. Public displays of affection? No need for it. Private life is private life."

Wildman is a Washington, D.C.-based writer who has contributed to The Washington Post and The New Republic.