*Former NYC mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife, Chirlane McCray, announced Wednesday that they are parting ways after nearly 30 years of marriage.
McCray began dating de Blasio in the 1990s, at a time when she publicly identified as a lesbian, Business Insider reports. In an interview with The New York Times, de Blasio and McCray said they do not plan to divorce and will continue living together and date other people.
“Even at this moment of change, this is a love story,” de Blasio said in a tweet, CNN reports.
“For the guy who took the chance on a woman who was an out lesbian and wrote an article called ‘I Am a Lesbian,'” de Blasio told The Times, “there was a part of me that would at times say, ‘Hmmm, is this like a time bomb ticking? Is this something that you’re going to regret later on?’ So I always lived with that stuff.”
As Insider reports, McCray wrote that article for ESSENCE in 1979, in which she touched on her sexual preference.
“I discovered my preference for women early, before getting locked into a traditional marriage and having children,” McCray wrote at the time — before she met de Blasio. After she and de Blasio tied the knot, McCray spoke to the publication again in 2013 and said she fell in love with him by “putting aside the assumptions I had about the form and package my love would come in.”
When asked if she is bisexual, McCray said she is “more than just a label.”
She added, “Why are people so driven to labeling where we fall on the sexual spectrum? Labels put people in boxes, and those boxes are shaped like coffins.”
As we reported previously via CNN, the ex-couple first met while working for the late former New York Mayor David Dinkins, the first Black man elected to lead the city, before marrying in 1994.
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