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"  At a sidewalk campaign stop on an Indian-summer afternoon, Chirlane McCray chats warmly but warily with a high-strung blond about real estate, fashion, and McCray&amp;#039;s husband, who stands fast by her side. Soon to become mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio is pale, 6&amp;#039;5&amp;quot;, garrulous, and gawky, while McCray is petite, cornrowed, and dark, with low-lidded eyes\u2014her husband&amp;#039;s opposite in all the ways that don&amp;#039;t really matter. Her well-wisher, meanwhile, looks more like what McCray recently called a &amp;quot;Muffy person&amp;quot;\u2014the kind of woman, she explained, whom politicians typically marry. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s got a beautiful shirt on,&amp;quot; says the blond, pointing to de Blasio. &amp;quot;What do you call that, like, a tattersall?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yeah,&amp;quot; McCray says, laughing, in a languid, measured drawl as hard to pigeonhole as the first lady\u2013elect herself. &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t heard that word in a long time.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Well, I used to do a lot of fox hunting. How many people do you meet who used to do a lot of fox hunting?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I think you&amp;#039;re the first,&amp;quot; says McCray, whose fetching pumpkin-colored top, she tells me, is from Burlington Coat Factory. &amp;quot;I love doing this. You learn something new every day!&amp;quot; McCray, a very youthful 59 to de Blasio&amp;#039;s 52, has learned a lot in the course of an exhilarating, exhausting Democratic primary campaign. Two months earlier, her husband was in fourth place in his bid to replace billionaire mayor Michael Bloomberg, behind both Christine Quinn, the lesbian city-council speaker, and the infamous Twitter twit Anthony Weiner. Less than two months after this event, de Blasio will beat his Republican opponent in a 49-percentage-point landslide, the greatest margin in city history for a nonincumbent. Related: How Kentucky&amp;#039;s Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes Is Giving Sen. Mitch McConnell a Run for His Money De Blasio&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;secret weapon,&amp;quot; as their friend Cynthia Nixon puts it, is the woman a growing legion of fans are simply calling Chirlane. She has always been a pioneer, willing or not: tormented as a black girl in a very white suburb; the author of a 1979 Essence article headlined &amp;quot;I Am a Lesbian&amp;quot;; a spoken-word poet and then a canny speechwriter; and lastly, a mother of two and her husband&amp;#039;s de facto chief strategist. Now, as New York City&amp;#039;s incoming first lady, she&amp;#039;s inevitably compared to Hillary Clinton or Michelle Obama. In truth, she&amp;#039;s an icon in no mold but her own. McCray has ridden every wavelet of postwar feminism: lashing out, acting up, opting out, leaning in. She&amp;#039;s spoken many truths to power, and now she&amp;#039;ll speak them in power. In what she stands for, what she does, and where she&amp;#039;s been, Chirlane has something fresh to offer not just true-blue New York, but a whole country ready to reexamine what it means to be a woman, a family, a race. None of the old dichotomies contain this public figure\u2014not black versus white, not gay versus straight, not political versus personal, not stand-by-your-man versus go-get-your-own, and not even the opposition between symbolism and substance, both of which she&amp;#039;s proud to contribute. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton paved the way for the collective so-what that greeted the de Blasios, but Chirlane carries a message beyond theirs. She doesn&amp;#039;t want us to transcend race or gender or sexual orientation. She wants us to see them for what they are, crucial but only partial components of a whole person. Only when taken together do these qualities and experiences make up Chirlane\u2014and the changing America in which she lives. The campaign stop&amp;#039;s typically motley New York crowd, a perfect microcosm of that changing America, is as enchanted by the &amp;quot;conventional unconventional&amp;quot; de Blasios (as McCray has put it) as it is by the candidate&amp;#039;s tax-the-rich platform. &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s Dante?&amp;quot; shouts a tiny Asian woman, asking after their 16-year-old son, a junior at Brooklyn Tech whose campaign-ad star turn and Internet-famous Afro helped make his father a front-runner. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s doing his homework,&amp;quot; says McCray, not for the first time. One of the day&amp;#039;s last hand-shakers is a young woman with a weighty silver hoop in her left nostril. De Blasio peers down at his wife. &amp;quot;Do you agree that her nose ring is almost exactly the size of the one you were wearing the day I met you?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;But it was gold, it was gold,&amp;quot; says McCray with an embarrassed laugh, as de Blasio presses on: &amp;quot;This was\u2014help me out\u20141991, in an office setting.&amp;quot; That would be City Hall. &amp;quot;You must agree that would be something that got your attention in 1991.&amp;quot; Of course there was more to it, he explains later: &amp;quot;A free spirit, independent, creative\u2014all these wonderful buttons got pushed.&amp;quot; But it started with her batik dress, her snaking braids, and the quiet defiance of that nose ring. &amp;quot;Okay,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Now you have some perspective.&amp;quot; The leafy, liberal Brooklyn refuge of Park Slope is where McCray feels most at home, and where we met at a local Italian restaurant to hash out her history. The de Blasios are so attached to the pale yellow row house where they&amp;#039;ve lived for the past 22 years (despite its single bathroom) that they&amp;#039;re conflicted about relocating to Gracie Mansion, the official mayor&amp;#039;s residence on Manhattan&amp;#039;s Upper East Side. Related: Try This at Home: Chiara De Blasio&amp;#039;s Floral Crown &amp;#039;Do Park Slope is a very long way from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, the Spring-field suburb where, in 1964, the McCrays became the third African-American family in town. They moved partly to secure their three daughters a better education, and Chirlane went on to Wellesley. &amp;quot;I succeeded, but there&amp;#039;s a cost,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;There are scars, and I don&amp;#039;t think it&amp;#039;s right to put children through that experience.&amp;quot; The most painful of Chirlane&amp;#039;s memories involve grade school, where classmates called out slurs or made faces and teachers looked on in silence. &amp;quot;You can be chased home or hit or called names or spit on and it&amp;#039;s over,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;You have the memory of it, but it&amp;#039;s very different from the emotional and psychological experience of feeling invisible, of not learning the confidence to stand up in class and speak.&amp;quot; She learned to be &amp;quot;much more perceptive&amp;quot; and to cautiously gauge &amp;quot;who are my friends \u2028and who are not my friends.&amp;quot; McCray endured by forging herself into a person &amp;quot;destined for leadership.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I was on swim team,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I was a lifeguard, camp counselor, the president of the YMCA Leaders Corps. I also took piano lessons. I was a dancer.&amp;quot; She did it all &amp;quot;for my sanity&amp;quot;; locked out of school mixers, she found shelter and friends in extracurriculars. But in her journals and her poetry, she plumbed darker currents\u2014personal insecurities and the triple threat of being female, black, and gay (she began dating women at 17). In one of her few published poems, she wrote of being too dark-skinned and of feeling that &amp;quot;Black girls cannot afford to have illusions of grandeur.&amp;quot; In college, McCray joined a mostly gay black feminist group called the Combahee River Collective. &amp;quot;I thought about causes,&amp;quot; she says, but not organized politics: &amp;quot;There were no people who looked like me who went into those fields.&amp;quot; She knew how to write, though, &amp;quot;and black people did write.&amp;quot; She took the Radcliffe Publishing Course, worked at Redbook and Cond\u00E9 Nast, and dreamed of founding a magazine for women of color &amp;quot;that had a little more substance to it&amp;quot; than those she read. But eventually her idealism led another way, into the administration of David Dinkins, New York&amp;#039;s first black mayor. She wound up writing speeches on inclusiveness and human rights. Her boss at the time, speechwriter Maria Laurino, remembers her as &amp;quot;quiet\u2014a modest personality,&amp;quot; in contrast to the ebullient and frenetic Dinkins aide Bill de Blasio. He was a persistent suitor, in spite of the fact (which she believes he suspected) that she identified as a lesbian. Yet he only worked up the courage to ask her out when, at the end of yet another phone call, she &amp;quot;finally just blurted it out\u2014&amp;#039;What do you want?&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; He knew exactly what he wanted, even as McCray slowly let him in on her history. She&amp;#039;s remarked that when she finally showed him the Essence article, &amp;quot;it shook him up, but he didn&amp;#039;t show it.&amp;quot; They were married in Prospect Park in 1994 by two gay ministers, followed by a honeymoon in Cuba (by way of Toronto). It was Bill who most wanted children, and at 40 Chirlane gave birth to Chiara, now a sophomore at a small university in Northern California. She continued \u2028writing speeches, working in health care, and consulting for politicians while her husband became one himself\u2014first a city councilman and then the public advocate. Several detractors accused de Blasio of using his diverse family to attract minority votes. (&amp;quot;He gets it,&amp;quot; read one of his campaign&amp;#039;s flyers picturing McCray in 2009.) Bloomberg even called his mayoral campaign &amp;quot;racist&amp;quot; just before September&amp;#039;s primary. It&amp;#039;s one of several charges McCray puts in the general category of &amp;quot;foolishness.&amp;quot; It wasn&amp;#039;t so long ago, after all, that an interracial couple was a definite liability\u2014a fatal departure from the Muffy prototype. &amp;quot;Up until now,&amp;quot; she says, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think that our family has been represented in a public way at all.&amp;quot; Besides, McCray has no objection to serving as a symbol of tolerance and empathy. &amp;quot;Symbols are important,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It depends on how they&amp;#039;re used.&amp;quot;  But McCray&amp;#039;s role in the election wasn&amp;#039;t symbolic; she shared her husband&amp;#039;s spot at the top of the campaign&amp;#039;s personnel chart. &amp;quot;Chirlane&amp;#039;s been part of every major strategic decision in this campaign from day one,&amp;quot; says de Blasio. &amp;quot;Literally. We started with an idea, and then we had to choose the core of our personnel, and then we had to choose our core ideas and message. Every part of it, every meeting that mattered,&amp;quot; she was there. Both de Blasios have worked for Clintons\u2014McCray as a Clinton administration appointee to New York&amp;#039;s Foreign Press Center, de Blasio as the manager of Hillary&amp;#039;s Senate campaign\u2014and New York&amp;#039;s new power couple harks back to the two-for-the-price-of-one Clintons. Still, it&amp;#039;s easy to make too much of the parallel, especially in the realm of political ambition. McCray, who once wrote the verse &amp;quot;\u2026I don&amp;#039;t want everyone looking at me,&amp;quot; still prefers to be backstage. When she claims to have no political plans of her own, friends and family believe her. If anything, she serves to counterbalance Bill&amp;#039;s relentless pace\u2014his tendency toward &amp;quot;all or nothing thinking,&amp;quot; as daughter Chiara puts it. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s very peaceful, and my dad&amp;#039;s pretty intense. She sort of centers him\u2026she calms him down.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s still capable, though, of riling people up. In one of the oddest twists of the summer campaign, McCray\u2014for so long unmarried and gay\u2014was angrily criticized by Quinn for seeming to tell The New York Times that Quinn, who is childless, doesn&amp;#039;t get New York parents. But the offending quote (&amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s not the kind of person I feel I can go up to and talk to about issues like taking care of children\u2026.&amp;quot;) turned out to have been mangled by Maureen Dowd from a more innocuous original. McCray insists that what she really meant when she said Quinn was not &amp;quot;accessible&amp;quot; on parenting issues was that she was insensitive to constituents. Cynthia Nixon, the bisexual actress and activist who supported de Blasio over Quinn, sees McCray as a stand-in for those constituents. She says Chirlane &amp;quot;can be extremely quiet&amp;quot; at events, but &amp;quot;if she wants to chime in about something, she&amp;#039;s incredibly effective.&amp;quot; Nixon remembers an anecdote McCray once brought up in public, which McCray recounted for me. Back in 2006, when her husband was a city councilman, McCray met Mayor Bloomberg at a Gracie Mansion function. Chiara was in middle school, and he&amp;#039;d just introduced a ban on cell phones in schools with which Chirlane disagreed. She was shy about confronting the famously frosty technocrat\u2014the antithesis of the hug-happy de Blasios. Finally, &amp;quot;I got up my nerve, and I went back to the Mayor and said, &amp;#039;I just want to tell you that you are my hero for getting the ban on smoking in public places. But the ban on cell phones\u2026&amp;#039; And I didn&amp;#039;t even get to finish my sentence, because the Mayor abruptly turned his back on me and walked away.&amp;quot; Nixon believes the story&amp;#039;s power lay in its very personal appeal for a more responsive government. &amp;quot;I think this was a shocking encounter for her,&amp;quot; she says. McCray felt snubbed not as a rival but as a citizen\u2014invisible, like that lonely Longmeadow High School overachiever. &amp;quot;I bring all of me and all my life experience to bear,&amp;quot; says McCray. &amp;quot;I influenced the campaign just because of who I am and what I&amp;#039;ve been through.&amp;quot; That influence has been deepest on issues that affect her as a citizen\u2014schools, hospital closures, minority and women&amp;#039;s rights. As a first lady, she&amp;#039;s likely to focus, as she always has, on causes rather than politics. She might be more of a Michelle than a Hillary. Yet when you put together all the crosscurrents in her life thus far\u2014the choices she&amp;#039;s made, the forces that made her\u2014it adds up to a hell of a broad agenda. McCray rarely finds the time to write poetry these days, though she jots notes in a journal (and has a delightful Twitter account). She did publish an article recently on The Root, critiquing Sheryl Sandberg&amp;#039;s Lean In. The Facebook honcho&amp;#039;s workplace manifesto inspired many career women, but it led McCray to muse &amp;quot;about how hard it really is to &amp;#039;lean in&amp;#039; when you don&amp;#039;t have paid parental leave, when your job demands that you work irregular hours, when quality child care costs more than rent.&amp;quot; In person, McCray goes further: &amp;quot;It troubles me that we&amp;#039;ve got this strain of feminism that says that to get ahead, to make progress, you&amp;#039;ve got to be more of a guy than the guys are in some respects.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s hard to talk to an outspoken first lady, a woman who learned from experience and purports to teach from it, and entirely avoid a dreaded clich\u00E9. Is McCray a role model? &amp;quot;For young women, yes, absolutely,&amp;quot; she says. And what can they learn from her life? &amp;quot;To never get stuck,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That there&amp;#039;s always a way to do more, that it&amp;#039;s important to take risks, and also to realize that you never know where your life might take you. You just never know.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/interviews/a12636/chirlane-mccray-profile/>