June 10, 2004 | Read Time: 6 minutes
Cheryl Jacques has heard all the clichés by now. She jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. She’s in the eye of the hurricane. She really stepped right into it. Just when she thought she was out, they pulled her back in.
But Ms. Jacques, who took over in January as executive director of the Human Rights Campaign, a 500,000-member advocacy organization that fights for equal treatment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people, doesn’t get tired of hearing those clichés for two reasons: They fit her circumstance, and the situation is one that she desired deeply.
Ms. Jacques, 41, took the job after serving 11 years in the Massachusetts State Senate. She was one of the state’s few openly gay legislators — and left office just as the state, and the rest of the country, focused on Beacon Hill as one of the flashpoints of the gay-marriage debate.
Under order from the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the state last month started allowing gay people to wed, but the state’s governor, Mitt Romney, and other politicians are taking steps to make gay marriage illegal again.
Meanwhile, across the continent, San Francisco began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples in February, and, as several other municipalities followed suit, President Bush announced that he wanted a constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage. Since the Human Rights Campaign wants to do all it can to make gay marriage legal nationwide, Ms. Jacques has not had much quiet time in her new role.
“There’s never been a more critical time,” Ms. Jacques says. “We’re at a critical turning point in this civil-rights battle. Our sons and daughters will study this the way we studied Brown versus the Board of Education.”
So now, instead of representing a district of several thousand in Boston’s western suburbs, she is representing a constituency of millions; nevertheless, the level of zealous advocacy won’t change.
As a state senator, Ms. Jacques was known for unleashing a torrent of press releases on issues, and for strong stances on gun control, civil rights, and abortion rights, in addition to gay rights. A former prosecutor, she won significant attention in 2001, when she ran unsuccessfully to fill the seat of U.S. Rep. Joseph J. Moakley, who had died earlier that year.
Now she’s on that national stage on a near-daily basis, not just unleashing press releases, but talking about the Human Rights Campaign’s agenda on national talk shows and lobbying members of Congress. In addition to promoting gay marriage, the Human Rights Campaign seeks to reduce hate crimes and curb on-the-job discrimination. Ms. Jacques also oversees fund raising as the head of the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, the advocacy group’s fund-raising arm.
The total budget for the Human Rights Campaign has grown by $5-million in the past year, to $29-million, and the organization just completed the purchase of a building in Washington to house its staff of 100.
“My senate career was all about advocacy and education, and this is all about advocacy and education,” she says of her job, which pays $225,000 annually. “It’s obviously about an issue that’s near and dear to my heart — it affects my life, my partner’s life, my children’s life — and that’s a real motivator. The mechanics are different, but the philosophical underpinnings, why I get up and do what I do every day, isn’t any different. I’m an advocate every day.”
In an interview, Ms. Jacques talked about her job:
Could you have expected this level of intensity within your first couple of months on the job?
I love to joke that a week to sharpen my pencils and organize my desk would have been nice, but there was just no such luck. I had no idea that things would heat up this quickly. I expected that with all eyes on Massachusetts, it would be an issue that got loud very quickly. But what I couldn’t imagine was that the president would actually cross the line with a federal anti-marriage amendment, and that he would cross that line so early in the campaign.
What were your other goals at the campaign and have they been marginalized by current events?
The Human Rights Campaign is fully committed to full equality in the workplace, at home, and in the community, and we have in no way lost sight of our equally important priorities, like hate crimes, HIV funding, protecting the rights of our gay, bisexual, and transgendered brothers and sisters to serve in the military. Having said that, our eye is on the ball; the reason an inordinate amount of our time is spent on marriage is because this is about equality. And if we hold the principal of equality for the marriage law, then the other walls come crumbling down. But if we lose these battles, the walls grow higher with regard to all the other battles for equality. The example I always use is, if you’re equal for the purposes of the marriage laws, it’s very hard for the employer to make you unequal in the workplace. If you’re not equal, it’s very hard to justify equal work benefits. They’re all equally interwoven.
What do you think about John Kerry’s opposition to gay marriage?
Obviously, we are disappointed that Senator Kerry does not support marriage equality, but when you look at his record over the span of his career, he has the strongest record of GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trangender] support of any presidential candidate in history.
How well did the intense nature of the Massachusetts State House prepare you for this kind of heated politicking?
I had already come out of the eye of the storm, having successfully led a bipartisan effort in 2002 to defeat the denial of marriage constitutional amendment [an amendment banning gay marriage that failed to make a state ballot], and I do feel that equipped me to understand and be ready for this fight on the national stage.
What was it like for you to see gay marriages start taking place in your home state?
It was incredibly emotional to see so many of my former constituents, friends, and colleagues realize that moment of joy. It was very, very moving. I want to make that kind of moment, and all of those protections and rights, available to same-sex couples nationwide.
Do you have any plans to return to Massachusetts and get married in the near future?
I consider it a privilege that my partner, Jenn, and I can have this very personal conversation. My goal as president of HRC is to make this kind of conversation possible for every same-sex couple in America.
ABOUT CHERYL JACQUES, NEW PRESIDENT AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF THE HUMAN RIGHTS CAMPAIGN:
Education: Earned a bachelor’s degree with a major in economics from Boston College, and a law degree from Suffolk University Law School.
Previous jobs: Assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Mass.; assistant attorney general, State of Massachusetts; Massachusetts state senator.
What she’s reading: Letter from Birmingham Jail, by Martin Luther King Jr.
