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On January 14, 2008 Simmons was elected the nation’s first black, openly lesbian mayor. She says being “in” with a higher-than-average number of social groups helped her get started in politics, and it continues to aid her in a public office where connecting with widely varied constituents is key.

“By being a member of a diverse number of communities, I am them and they are me,” Simmons says. “I am serving as a woman, as a lesbian, as a parent, as a business woman. I remember being a young mother applying for housing, and watching the owner walk by me when he realized who I was. I’ve been through all that, and I know what it was like.”

A political pioneer in a town that has had only three female mayors before her, Simmons was subjected to an onslaught of media attention when elected to Cambridge’s top post. She had accumulated more than a quarter-century of personal and public experience before that, however, and boasts that she brought it all with her.

In fact, one of her first acts after the election was to testify before the Massachusetts state legislature in favor of a bill strengthening the rights of stalking victims. Her argument: Her own terror after being harassed years ago showed her that strong legal protection was necessary.

“I think everybody draws on their personal life in any kind of work,” she says, adding that her situation just happens to offer her many levels of access. As a mother of four who is also raising three granddaughters, she attends the same soccer and basketball games as her constituents do and talks casually to the parents there. A black Catholic, she frequents church services of several denominations and absorbs community sentiment along with the worship.

“I’m there not because I’m a visitor, but because I’m a member of the community,” she says. “Someone else would only come on a special visit, where they’d only hear certain things.”

Simmons, who earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Massachusetts in Boston and went on to complete a master’s in psychotherapy from Antioch College, never had a counseling practice but says the training “absolutely comes in handy” in public office. She accepted her first municipal job with the Cambridge Civic Unity Committee (a citizens’ rights organization) in 1980, and took over as executive director two years later. Amid fears that her 20-hour-a-week position with the committee would be scaled back to ten, Simmons founded the Cambridgeport Insurance Agency with a friend in 1982, and the business is still thriving under her daughter’s leadership.

Working with different ethnic and religious groups during her time with the Civic Unity Committee made her realize that underrepresented individuals need advocates in elected office, she says.

It was her responsibility to organize parents in Cambridge public schools, where the minority population outnumbers whites, and to work with the School Committee (Cambridge’s equivalent of a school board) to improve the performance of black students and stimulate affirmative action hiring. That sometimes Herculean task inspired her to seek a spot on the School Committee.

“When we left the room, the cause left the room with us,” she explains. “I realized that if you don’t have someone on the other side championing your cause, it can be left on the table.”

Simmons served a decade on the School Committee, keeping the position until winning a Cambridge City Council seat in 2002. There, she worked to involve average citizens in their local government, holding a series of focused town meetings. The city’s GLBT Committee was formed after a gay and lesbian town meeting she sponsored.

Becoming a gay public figure was relatively painless in a hometown affectionately dubbed the “People’s Republic of Cambridge,” she says. Her predecessor in the town of about 101,000, according to the 2000 census, which hosts the academic giants of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was Ken Reeves, who is also gay and black (though not a woman or a parent, as Simmons points out).

“Cambridge is incredibly affirming,” she says. “I just have to be careful to remember the whole world isn’t like Cambridge.”

Plus, now that she’s mayor, people are more interested in what she does than who she is.

“People coming into my office come for housing or some other issue,” she says. “They don’t care if I have polka dots and a pointed head, they care about services.”

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