Feisty Aphrodite Archives
Gay Paris Mayor Mulling Presidency
The following is from 365Gay.com:
Bertrand Delanoe appears headed for easy re-election in next week's municipal vote but he already is being courted by his Socialist Party to run for the presidency in the next general election.
It could make him the first openly gay head of a major country.
In 1998, while he was a relatively obscure city councilor, Delanoe came out in a television interview, breaking an unwritten French law that a politician's private life should remain private.
He later said that friends urged him not to go public, but that he overruled them because of the good he felt it would do to advance gay rights. "Would not my intervention help even if only in a small way to lighten the burden of secrecy borne by so many people," he wrote in his 2004 biography.
In 2001 Delanoe was elected the capital's first ever Socialist mayor and the first gay person to head a city government in a major city.
A year later Delanoe was stabbed by a deranged homophobe as he presided over an all-night cultural party at city hall.
He was rushed to hospital suffering a single stab wound to his abdomen. Doctors at Pitie-Salpetriere hospital operated on Delanoe for more than three hours. He would spend nearly a month in hospital.
Police arrested a man at the scene. During interrogations he told investigators he hated gays and politicians.
Since becoming mayor Delanoe has been hugely popular, particularly with the poor and middle classes.
Public opinion polls put him well ahead of the opposition going into the municipal elections on March 9 and 16.
But his popularity also is high outside Paris and some in the Socialist Party see him as their strongest hope for defeating President Nicolas Sarkozy in the next election - scheduled for 2012. Read the entire story here.
