Katherine Patrick, the daughter of Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, has come out very publicly through an interview with the Boston gay newspaper, Bay Windows.

Patrick and his daughter are planning to march tomorrow in the Boston Pride Parade. They also marched together last year, although at the time the governor did not know that his daughter was just becoming comfortable calling herself a lesbian.

“We live in a fishbowl and to some extent we’re dealing with that,” Patrick told reporters yesterday in a brief statement, Boston Globe reports. “But we’re proud of her, we love her, we support her, and I think that’s all that needs to be said.”

Katherine recounted for Bay Windows editor Laura Kiritsy the story of standing next to her father among jubilant crowds at the capitol in June, 2007 after the Massachusetts legislature had defeated a proposed amendment that would have delayed the implementation of a court order legalizing same-sex marriage in the state.

As the crowd cheered the defeat of the amendment — an effort led by the governor, Senate President Therese Murray and House Speaker Sal DiMasi — Katherine said she never before felt more proud of her father.

“Because, of course, he didn’t know that I was gay then,” the 18-year-old recalls. “So, for someone so publicly to fight for something that doesn’t even affect him was just like, ’That’s my dad,’ you know?” she says with a laugh. “That’s all I could think. I was very, very proud to be part of this family, and this state in general.”

Three weeks later, she worked up the nerves to come out to her parents during a family vacation. Katherine Patrick walked into the kitchen, told her parents to stop what they were doing, and asked her aunt to leave the room.

“I’m a lesbian,” she told them.

Her mother, expecting terrible news, nearly burst out laughing, a sense of relief coming over her, Bay Windows reports.

Her father wrapped her in a bear hug and said, “Well, we love you no matter what.”

Both of her parents quickly moved in for a group hug, she said.

Katherine had already come out to her friends, her sister Sarah and a maternal aunt with whom she is close, Lynn Prime. She told Bay Windows that she waited for an opportunity to come out to both parents at the same time - a difficult task given their busy lives - so as not to make either of them feel that she was more comfortable with one parent over the other. So when the moment came, she just decided to go for it.

“It was the easiest coming out experience that anyone could possibly have,” Katherine told Bay Windows.

The paper reports that the youngest member of the Patrick family “exudes comfort and confidence during her first sit-down interview” with her father by her side.

The newspaper talked to the Patricks in a conference room table at the Beacon Street headquarters of MassEquality, where Katherine has been interning since March.

While Katherine is comfortable with her very public coming out, her parents remain wary, Bay Windows reports. Patrick and his wife, First Lady Diane Patrick, have zealously guarded the privacy of Katherine and her older sister Sarah, a recent graduate of Georgia University, they reluctantly agreed to Katherine’s decision to share her story publicly.

Patrick’s misgivings stem partly from the fact that his daughter wouldn’t do an interview to announce that she is straight. “But the world is such and my job is such that rather than have someone do a ’gotcha’ and our giving the misimpression that this wasn’t completely natural in our family, then we thought, ’Alright, let’s just say it and move on,’” he says.

Though Patrick and his wife, First Lady Diane Patrick, have zealously guarded the privacy of Katherine and her older sister Sarah, a recent graduate of Georgia University, they reluctantly agreed to Katherine’s decision to share her story publicly. Both Katherine and Patrick agreed to an interview with Bay Windows, they said, in the hopes of avoiding a “gotcha” news story about Katherine’s sexual orientation that might give the false impression that the family was anything less than accepting and supportive of Katherine.

“As private of an issue as it is, we’ve sort of had to come to terms with the fact that we are a public family and there you give a part of yourself away,” says Katherine.

“And we also … wanted people to know that it’s not only something that we accept, but it’s something that we’re very proud of. It’s a great aspect of our lives and there’s nothing about it that is shameful or that we would want to hide.”

Bay Windows notes that Patrick is the first elected official in the country to win statewide office after having campaigned on support for marriage equality. He spent a significant amount of political capital on the defeat of the marriage amendment, meeting privately with more than a dozen wavering legislators, strategizing with legislative leaders and publicly discussing why he supported marriage equality and why he thought the amendment should be defeated.

But he says that the notion that one of his daughters could be gay didn’t factor into his advocacy on the issue.

“Fault me for not getting it,” the governor said in the interview. Then he reveals when he got the first inkling that his daughter might be gay: “I think when Katherine started to memorize all the episodes of The L Word, there was some hint that maybe she was sending us.”

Sources: With love and pride, Governor Deval Patrick’s daughter comes out publicly | Bay Windows
A Patrick family coming-out | Boston Globe

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