Comstock's magazine 1117 - November 2017 | Page 61

Cabaldon says he truly realized he was gay in his mid-20s, but coming out of
the closet did not seem like an option. He didn’t know any gay politicians, and all
the gay characters in movies and television were “super-liberated caricatures.”
In 2000, Cabaldon stood over Diane’s tombstone, and with tears stream-
ing down his cheeks, made the most powerful declaration of his personal life.
“I’m not sure I’m getting this right, Mom. I’m trying to do the right thing.
I think I figured this out,” he remembers saying. The following revelation be-
gan def lating a capsule of pain born many years before: “I think I’m gay,”
Cabaldon told his mother.
She probably already knows, he reassured himself. Even if the news would
have disturbed Diane when she was a conservative 32-year-old, society had
since become more understanding, and Cabaldon assumed his mom would
have evolved too.
“Because I’m achievement-oriented I’d think, 'She’d
be OK with this because I’ve done this and this,'” the
mayor recalls thinking at the time. “She would have to
be happy with all these other things.” (Cabaldon came
out to his father in 2004. The two men seldom speak.)
In 2006, Cabaldon saw a casting call for a reality show
called “Coming Out Stories,” which chronicled gay peo-
ple as they prepared and eventually came out to friends
and family. If a politician would just go on this show, at-
titudes would shift and I could be openly gay, Cabaldon
remembers thinking.
The mayor poured his heart into a two-page letter
to the show’s producers, describing the casual bigotry
encountered by a closeted politician in a working-class
town, and the fear of being outed. Cabaldon explained
that he was considering coming out at his State of the
City address, his most prominent annual address. The
next day, the New York-producers asked the mayor if they
could send a film crew out to live with him, and film him
each day leading up to the announcement. He agreed.
The response to Cabaldon’s coming out speech was overwhelmingly posi-
tive. Hundreds of strangers from across the country wrote the mayor letters
about painful struggles they had endured as members of the LGBT commu-
nity. An Elk Grove navy officer told Cabaldon he couldn’t come out for fear of
losing his job, “but pretty much all my close friends know,” he wrote. A West
Sacramento municipal worker spoke of the loneliness he felt thinking he was
the only gay worker at City Hall. Another wrote to say Cabaldon’s story in-
spired him to come out to coworkers by bringing his longtime partner to an
upcoming company holiday party.
The mayor said the flood of emails enabled him to finally break free from a
“hermetically-concealed room [of the mind] that no one else could possibly get
into or I could get out of,” he says. That sense of liberation, he adds, hasn’t sub-
sided in over a decade.
“People tell me more things than they used to. They show me more things
than they used to,” Cabaldon says. “I have definitely felt more human, and a
better human.”
CABALDON'S
INVOLVEMENT IN A
NATIONAL MAYOR'S
GROUP HAS GRANTED
HIM ACCESS TO
CONGRESSIONAL
LEADERS AND THE
WHITE HOUSE.
West Sacramento Mayor Christopher Cabaldon
with then-President Barack Obama in late 2015.
photo : courtesy of christopher cabaldon
November 2017 | comstocksmag.com
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