Eighteen-year-old
Katherine Patrick, daughter of Massachusetts governor
Deval Patrick, came out as lesbian during an interview she
conducted with her father by her side.
“I’ll always remember the first thing my dad
did was, [he] wrapped me in a bear hug and said,
‘Well, we love you no matter
what,’” Katherine Patrick told Bay
Windows, an LGBT publication that covers New
England.
Eighteen-year-old
Katherine Patrick, daughter of Massachusetts governor
Deval Patrick, came out as lesbian during an interview she
conducted with her father by her side.
“I’ll always remember the first thing my dad
did was, [he] wrapped me in a bear hug and said,
‘Well, we love you no matter
what,’” Katherine Patrick told Bay
Windows, an LGBT publication that covers New
England.
Governor Patrick
and first lady Diane Patrick fully supported
Katherine’s decision to come out publicly,
despite acknowledging that if their daughter were
straight, she would not have had to make a formal
announcement about the matter. “But the world is such
and my job is such that rather than have someone do a
‘gotcha’ [story about Katherine's
sexuality] and our giving the misimpression that this
wasn’t completely natural in our family, then
we thought, All right, let’s just say it and
move on,” the governor said.
Diane Patrick,
who was caught in traffic and conferenced into the
interview via phone, said she was initially trepidatious
when Katherine asked to speak with her parents
privately: "I often think the worst when I get that
kind of buildup. And so I was thinking, Oh, my
goodness, she failed something or she did something
really bad -- not that she has a habit of
doing those things -- but I worried." Bay Windows
reports that Diane Patrick nearly laughed with relief
after her daughter turned to them and said, "I'm a
lesbian."
"I thought,
Well, what did she think we were going to say about
this? Because I really hoped that she didn’t
harbor any concern that we were going to be worried or
upset or scandalized in any way," the first lady said.
Katherine, who
will be a freshman at Smith College this fall, expressed
pride in her father’s recent work for LGBT rights:
Governor Patrick worked diligently to help defeat an
anti–gay marriage amendment in Massachusetts
last summer. "Because, of course, he didn’t know that
I was gay then," she said. "So for someone so publicly
to fight for something that doesn’t even affect
him was just like, ’That’s my dad,’
you know?" (The Advocate)
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