LGBTQ activists spoke out against actress and gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon on Thursday, taking issue with her account in a recent interview of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s signing of the Marriage Equality Act.
In a New York magazine article published Sunday, Nixon said Cuomo “had a lot of big Republican donors who wanted the marriage issue to go away because they thought it was making the party look bad.”
She also gave the governor credit, saying, “I think he spent political capital on it, and I think he was very savvy about the way he did it.”
But Cathy Marino-Thomas, former board president of Marriage Equality USA, said in an open letter signed by more than a dozen people, including many involved with the former organization, that Nixon’s recollection isn’t accurate. Marriage Equality USA officially disbanded in late 2017, according to the group’s website.
“Ms. Nixon’s account of the political landscape at best shows naivety and ignorance or at worst is a cynical omission of the truth,” Marino-Thomas said in a statement. “Her take is not just inaccurate, it’s undermining of important work by true activists and supportive elected officials. It is also self-serving and amounts to a gesture intended to serve her current purposes that rewrites history and erases work that transformed hundreds of thousands of lives for the better.”
Marino-Thomas added that “passage of New York’s Marriage Equality Act was never an easy or politically expedient task even in 2011.”
Nixon married her wife, Christine Marinoni, in 2012, a year after Cuomo made same-sex marriage legal in New York.
A representative for Nixon did not immediately respond to request for comment.
