The man who may soon be the first openly gay person elected as a governor in the US sat silently in Maine’s house of representatives as an older colleague embarked on a homophobic tirade against the anti-discrimination proposal that they were considering.



“I don’t see them as gay because they never smile, they have got that withdrawn look,” J Robert Carrier, a Democrat from Westbrook, told the chamber in Augusta in May 1983, as a 28-year-old Mike Michaud looked on. “I feel sorry for those people,” said Carrier.

Urging fellow lawmakers to vote against a bill that would have outlawed discrimination against Maine’s estimated 100,000 gay citizens for housing or jobs, Carrier said that just as “if you want to be a drunk, if you want to be a liar, if you want to be a thief, if you want to be a crook”, the solution to homosexuality was “self-discipline”.

Proponents of the bill spoke out passionately, likening the persecution of gays at the time to the shameful treatment of black people and women that required corrective legislation in the past. One even raised the spectre of the Third Reich’s actions against unwanted minorities.

But Michaud, who in coming out 30 years later would say he was “brought up believing you should judge a person based on the content of his or her character” rather than sexual orientation, said nothing. Instead, he lined up with Carrier and 99 other House members and voted to kill the proposal. Then he addressed the House on the merits of a plan to allow the hunting of coyotes at night. “I think we ought to at least give it a chance,” he said.

The young Democrat, representing his rural home district between working shifts at a paper mill there, remained quiet for years through years of more colourfully intolerant remarks as the measure repeatedly came up for debate. He made 18 similar votes against it during his 22 years in Maine’s legislature, and was among just five state senators to oppose it even up to its long-awaited passage in 1997.

Now one of the state’s two members of the US House of Representatives, where he has served six terms, he was reserved when Maine passed gay marriage legislation in 2009, even as his colleague, Chellie Pingree, took to the floor of the US House to endorse it. (The people of the state voted later that year to repeal the law; gay marriages were eventually allowed after a referendum in 2012.)

It is a record that has left some veteran equality campaigners cool about Michaud’s candidacy for governor even as he attempts to secure a landmark political victory for their cause on Tuesday by unseating Governor Paul LePage, the Republican incumbent, who is seeking what would be his second term.

“Gay or not, Mike was not there,” said Betsy Smith, who led EqualityMaine, the state’s oldest and biggest gay rights advocacy group, for 14 years until 2013. “He just was not there.”

Michaud’s own sexuality – and “many of us knew for many, many years,” said Smith – only made his lack of support more frustrating, she said. Smith made headlines last year by endorsing Eliot Cutler, an independent candidate for the governorship, who claims a longer and more consistent record of supporting gay rights. Critics accuse Michaud of making a stronger commitment to LGBT equality only in the relative safety of recent years.

This week, he struck a rueful note. “I could make excuses but I won’t,” he told the Guardian. “I regret some of my earlier votes and feel fortunate that friends and constituents continued to talk with me and share their stories so that I could gain a greater understanding of the issue.”

Cutler, a wealthy lawyer, likes to recount how, by contrast, he grew up watching his parents receive death threats after his father, the chairman of the University of Maine’s board, supported its first gay and lesbian student group in the early 1970s. He has personally donated and helped raise tens of thousands of dollars for gay rights causes.

He is, however, trailing far behind both Michaud and LePage, who appear to be virtually neck-and-neck, in polls. Smith said that for some liberals and LGBT rights advocates who would otherwise support Cutler, the election has therefore become “a referendum on LePage”, who opposes same-sex marriage, accused a state legislator of shafting the public “without providing Vaseline”, and once said that he could not see “how people, at least sane people, would want to allow transgender in our primary schools and our high schools”.

Earlier this week, Cutler said at a press conference at which it was believed he would drop out of the running that he would remain in the race but that he was a realist, and that his supporters should vote for another candidate if they feared that backing him could result in a victory for their least favourite out of LePage and Cutler.

The move was widely expected to assist the Democrat. Supporters of Cutler favour Michaud over LePage 55% to 35%, Public Policy Polling found in a survey conducted last week. Of the Cutler supporters polled, 73% had a negative view of LePage, and the poll showed Michaud would lead 49-44 in a head-to-head race.

Maine independent gubernatorial candidate Eliot Cutler, Governor Paul LePage, and Mike Michaud, participate in a debate in Portland, Maine, lasst month. Photograph: Robert F. Bukaty/AP

Cutler, however, declines to tip his hand to either of the “two lousy choices”, and is scathing about Michaud’s record on gay rights. “I find it unforgivable,” he told the Guardian. “It is inconceivable to me how someone could have voted no to equality unless they put crass politics above principle. And that happened every time. I would never vote for him.”

Michaud has suggested that if he had backed gay rights at the time he would have been voted out by his constituents in Penobscot county, where close-knit Franco-American Catholic families like his own – “I’m 100% French,” he said in 2000 – made for a socially conservative electorate. “Cutler, he never ran for office,” Michaud said earlier this month. “It’s easy to say one thing, but he has never had a history or a record.” Michaud also opposed gun control and abortion rights at the time, yet is now endorsed by Planned Parenthood after he declared once he made it to Congress: “My views on abortion have evolved.”

Maine’s consistent support for Democratic presidential nominees since the early 1990s belies a moderate streak that will probably see Susan Collins, its Republican senior senator, emphatically re-elected next week. Michaud is the only New Englander in the “Blue Dog” group of conservative Democrats. But Cutler is contemptuous of Michaud’s excuses. “Oh, please,” he said. “Many others who represented more conservative districts found that it was possible to vote yes.” Smith, the former EqualityMaine chief, concurs. “There are people who took hard votes,” she said.

Ann Rand, a Democrat who co-sponsored the equality measure while representing a liberal Portland seat in the state house in the 1980s, said that Michaud did not cast his no votes happily. “He never lobbied against us. He once told me ‘Ann, I promise I would never cast the deciding vote’,” she said. Praising him as her hardest-working colleague, she said: “Maybe we all have something we look back on and say probably we could have done differently.”

Michaud stresses that since entering Congress he has pushed for equality, co-sponsoring ENDA, a longstanding proposal for a nationwide anti-discrimination measure comparable to the one he repeatedly rejected as a state lawmaker. He stresses that public attitudes have changed dramatically over the course of his career and claims: “My record tells a story of progress”. The Human Rights Campaign, which gives him a 100% rating for the current Congress, has endorsed him for governor. Under its new leadership, EqualityMaine has done the same – much to Cutler’s fury.

Matt McTighe, Michaud’s campaign manager, led the successful state referendum on same-sex marriage, and has publicly attested to the candidate’s commitment to equality. The state Democratic party is eager to stress that Cutler has recently accepted money from conservatives who typically “only back the most extreme, conservative, anti-gay, anti-choice candidates in the country”. and are trying to prop him up to draw votes from the Democrat.

Michaud’s sexuality has proved to be a non-issue in the campaign. As he appeared in Portland on Thursday night alongside a Democrat who once made history of his own, there was little clue – and no reference – to the landmark victory that could be in store next week. “We are Mainers young and old, rich and poor, male and female, black and white, gay and straight,” was all Michaud said on the issue, before introducing President Barack Obama.

Stating that his personal life had “never factored into how I do my job”, Michaud wrote when coming out last year: “I don’t plan to make my personal life or my opponents’ personal lives an issue in this campaign.” But some in Maine feel that he might have done more to help push America to a point where that was possible.