The American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) new executive director is both gay and Latino -- a first on both fronts in the organization's 81-year history.

A Boston Globe story announced 35-year-old Anthony Romero's selection under the headline ``ACLU Picks Gay Hispanic as New Executive Director." The New York Times proclaimed, ``Newly Named ACLU Director Is 1st Gay Man, 1st Hispanic in Post."

Never mind the fact that the Bronx, N.Y., native is more than qualified to helm the nation's most prominent civil rights organization -- the ACLU's national board of directors voted unanimously to give him the job late last month. A graduate of Princeton University and Stanford Law School, Romero is presently the Director of the Human Rights and International Cooperation Unit for the Ford Foundation, where he manages $90 million in grants. The unit -- the foundation's largest program -- coordinates efforts to protect civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights both nationally and internationally. After joining the Ford Foundation in1992 as a program officer in the Rights and Social Justice Program, Romero ascended to his current executive position after just four years, becoming one of the youngest directors in the Ford Foundation's history.

But Romero is not complaining about the attention being paid to his sexual orientation or his ethnic roots. ``I'm very proud of both," he told Bay Windows. ``I'm very proud of my heritage as a Latino because it's infused all aspects of my activism and of my commitment to issues of racial justice. I am equally passionate and proud of my life as a gay man. I bring to the mainstream civil rights community a core concern for the rights and equality of lesbian and gay people. My appointment as the executive director of the premier civil rights and civil liberties organization allows me a very important perch from which to work with the other civil rights organizations, to bring to their greater focus and greater attention the needs of lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual people across the country."

More than likely, had it not been for those two facets of his life, Romero would not be preparing to take the reins of the ACLU from current Executive Director Ira Glasser, who is ending his 23-year tenure to spend more time with his family.

Romero, who officially moves into the top spot in September, explains that his deep commitment to civil rights and civil liberties stems from his life experience and the racial discrimination he and his family experienced while Romero was growing up. The son of Puerto Rican immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life, Romero was raised in a low-income housing project rife with crime and poverty. Romero's parents, he recalls, ``gave us enormous love and dignity and a great home around us, yet struggled with some of the larger forces around them."

His father, the late Demetrio Romero, established a reputation as a hard worker during his 39 years of employment at the Warwick Hotel; however, he waited many years before being promoted from houseman to banquet waiter, as Latinos were rarely promoted at the hotel. Romero would later find out when he worked at the hotel during college vacations that managers referred to his father as ``Chico," a generic name for a Latino worker. The family did not fare much better when they finally left the Bronx project for a working-class, mostly white New Jersey neighborhood. It was there that Romero and his sister were confronted for the first time with racial epithets, jokes and stereotypes. Romero's experiences were the subject of a chapter in ``We Won't Go Back," a 1997 book about affirmative action -- without which, Romero has said, he would not have been so successful.

Being gay has further spurred Romero's commitment to civil rights for all people as well. ``My interest in civil rights and civil liberties also comes from my life experience as a gay man -- growing up gay, seeing that we haven't achieved full equality under the law. The fact that gay and lesbian people have still not been granted their full constitutional rights has always been a major driver in my life," he says.

Romero recalls that as a child he was a ``bookish" student, who did not excel at sports and socialized mostly with female classmates. Though he was not taunted specifically for being gay, he was taunted for being different. ``I understood `different' long before I understood the words gay or lesbian."

As executive director of the ACLU, Romero has as a goal nurturing a new generation of civil rights activists and civil libertarians. The United States, said Romero in a May 1 press release, faces the continuing challenges of racial profiling, threats to reproductive choice, hostility to immigrants, a growing prison population and ``most importantly, a generation of young people who do not fully embrace or appreciate the need for constant vigilance and defense of our constitutional freedoms." He is also eager to explore the issue of how the rapidly advancing fields of science and technology impact freedom of expression, privacy and discrimination.

Romero also looks forward to working with the ACLU's Lesbian and Gay Rights project, and says the gay community is at a ``critical juncture" in terms of civil liberties and civil rights. ``[W]e are finding that our basic civil liberties and civil rights are being eroded by new government programs or by developments in the courts, or in some cases our own complacency erodes our commitment to civil rights and civil liberties," he says. ``For the gay community this is particularly acute. The fact is that these new government initiatives, especially around religion, are potentially going to lead us down the road to government-funded religion and if Congress adopts some of these programs, the government's going to narrowly choose between different religious groups, very often carving out civil rights protections that exist because the institutions delivering services are religious institutions. That seriously affects gay and lesbian civil rights," he says, pointing to the case of Alicia Pedreira, who was fired from her counseling job at Kentucky Baptist Homes for Children because she is a lesbian.

Kentucky Baptist Homes is a private religious organization; however, the majority of its operating costs are government-funded. The ACLU's Gay and Lesbian Civil Rights Project is representing Pedreira in her federal lawsuit against both the state and Kentucky Baptist Homes. ``The ACLU to its great credit has had a Gay and Lesbian Rights Project for many years," says Romero. ``This is a project that predates my appointment as executive director of the ACLU because the ACLU always understood that gay and lesbian rights were part and parcel of our broader commitment to the constitutional rights of Americans. We have a fantastic project director in Matt Coles," says Romero.

Coles and his colleagues at the Lesbian and Gay Rights Project could not be happier with Romero's appointment. ``We are ecstatic," Coles told Bay Windows. ``Anthony is not a household name in the lesbian and gay community, but if you're involved in the business of civil rights work you know Anthony Romero," he added. ``He was a leader in making Ford the first foundation to do lesbian and gay rights work."

As a gay man, he says, Romero knows gay issues ``inside and out," which can only benefit the work the ACLU does to advance gay and lesbian civil rights.

Though Romero doesn't shy away from the spotlight, he also has no qualms about exercising his constitutional right to privacy when it comes to the details of his private life. He declines to name his partner of five years, with whom he lives in Manhattan. ``We've agreed that as I take up the leadership of the ACLU that I will be a very outspoken and very active, very energetic leader of all these civil liberties and civil rights issues, including gay and lesbian rights. But I promised him that I would keep our family life private," he explains. ``That when I walk out of that very glaring hot spotlight, I'm coming home to him and he's going to be waiting there for me with open arms, with love and support, but I promised him that I was going to be the leader and that we were going to be lovers."

Care to comment on this article? We'd love to hear from you! Send a letter to the editor to letters@baywindows.com.

Return to TBC GLBT News