In an interview, Ms. McCray embraced the model of the Clintons’ working partnership, saying that the former secretary of state is the first lady she most admires. She acknowledges feeling so passionately in 2002 about which way her husband would vote on the next City Council speaker she threatened to divorce him if he backed the wrong candidate.
He sided with his wife.
(The candidate Ms. McCray opposed later went to prison. “He was a slimeball,” she said.)
Asked if she had ever considered playing a less assertive role in the mayoral race, Ms. McCray physically balked, leaning in from across the table at a Brooklyn diner.
“No, no,” she said. “It’s not who I am. It’s not who Bill and I have been as a couple, either.”
She added, “We’ve always been partners in the campaigns and any major thing we have taken on.”
They are, in their relationship, their politics and, above all, their lifestyle, a striking departure from the city’s reigning pair, Michael R. Bloomberg and Diana L. Taylor, his longtime girlfriend.
Ms. Taylor, a banker, rarely campaigned with the mayor and kept a studied distance from City Hall, adopting the role of his glamorous sidekick on the city’s charity circuit, often seen but seldom heard.
“We are very different people from him and Diana,” Ms. McCray said.
She does little to disguise her deep distaste for the Bloomberg era, when, by her lights, the ranks of the poor surged to unconscionable levels (“that’s not sustainable” she said), gentrification brought a commoditized sameness to once quirky neighborhoods (“we are losing our communities,” she worries) and New York City venerated its swelling class of ultrarich.
“I mean, our leader was a billionaire; I think that contributed to it,” she said.
Ms. McCray recalled, with a mixture of awe and amusement, the experience of dining at Mr. Bloomberg’s opulent home on the Upper East Side a few years ago, a home she described, dryly, as “very structured.”
“It was all very, to me, very stiff,” she remembered. “I think everyone was, like, on their best behavior.”
Ms. McCray has taken her dismay to the ballot box, saying she had not once voted for Mr. Bloomberg. She yearns to restore New York’s reputation as what she called “a progressive capital,” worrying it has trailed behind cities like San Francisco, Seattle, even Cleveland.
“They are all doing exciting new things,” she said. “And what are we doing?”
Her anti-establishment sentiment runs deep. In high school during the late 1960s, where for a time she was the sole black student, she caught the attention of the faculty by calling out cruel classmates in a column for the campus newspaper, a social outcast publicly challenging her tormentors.
“She was subjected to what clearly today would be called bullying,” recalled Michael McCarthy, her Spanish teacher and mentor. “I was probably the only friend she had in school.”
Her greatest fury, however, was reserved for the adults who let her down: the white construction workers who spit at her as she rode a bike in town, the parents who excluded her from boy-girl mixers, and the instructors who allowed students to mock her with racial epithets.
“The shocking thing is that the teachers wouldn’t do anything,” Ms. McCray said. “It was horrible. To know that they could get away with it, that it was condoned behavior.”
There was little sympathy at home, where her father, an inventory clerk at a military base, and her mother, an assembly worker at an electronics factory, waged their own battle to fit into an upper-middle-class town of strivers near Springfield, Mass. Ms. McCray was instructed to tell anyone who asked that her mother was a homemaker, just like the other women in the neighborhood, a lie she learned to repeat reflexively.
So she poured her disillusionment into poems and short stories, many of them laced with adolescent self-loathing. “I’ve spent my life as a Black girl,” she wrote years later. “A nappy-headed, no-haired, fat-lipped, big-bottomed Black girl and the poem will surely come out wrong like me.”
Her four years at Wellesley, an all-women’s, liberal arts college, brought both a long-sought social acceptance and a new form of rejection. Her being a lesbian was discovered when a classmate found her in an intimate dorm-room embrace with another woman. “Some of the women in my dorm were totally freaked out by it,” she said.
It was then that her social and political activism took root, building on the belief, articulated by a nascent group of like-minded women in Boston, that black lesbians had something different to say about discrimination and identity than the mainstream women’s liberation movement.
Ms. McCray joined what would become the Combahee River Collective, an influential collection of black feminist intellectuals, many of them gay, who felt overlooked by the 1970s politics of Betty Friedan and Ms. magazine.
“We knew it was revolutionary,” Ms. McCray said. “Just by sitting down and talking to each other, it was breaking through the madness.”
By the time she started a job in the press office of New York’s City Hall in 1991, there was no confusion: she had zero interest in dating a man, a message that Mr. de Blasio, then a lanky, bearded operative across the building, jauntily ignored.
He flirted with her mercilessly, she said, calling nonstop and trying to steal an unwelcome kiss. “I actually told him, ‘Slow this down,’ ” Ms. McCray said. Her resistance became less diplomatic: “Back off.”
But a romance blossomed: Mr. de Blasio, five years her junior, won over her family with an overnight visit that earned him a new moniker: “Brother Bill.”
For Ms. McCray’s lesbian friends, her engagement to Mr. de Blasio, in 1993, was a stunning turn. Not all of them could stomach it. One of them refused to attend the wedding.
Their marriage was defined by politics and activism. He ran for school board, City Council, then public advocate. She wrote speeches for Mayor David N. Dinkins, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr. and State Comptroller H. Carl McCall. A stint in the public relations department at Citigroup, the Wall Street bank minting cash in the early 2000s, ended after six months when she realized “this was not a good fit for me.”
Even as their clout grew, they kept their distance from Manhattan’s corridors of wealth and power, making their home in Brooklyn’s left-leaning Park Slope, a place so woven into the family’s identity that Ms. McCray feels conflicted about uprooting her son, Dante, a high school junior, should they move to Gracie Mansion on the Upper East Side.
She has been taken aback by the sudden stardom of her Afro-favoring son who has been mobbed at public events, deluged with requests to appear on television and irritated that those who approach him only want to talk about his hair.
“What blows my mind is how much there is, it’s amazing,” she said. “I don’t think anyone — not one of us — anticipated it would be such a thing.”
These days, Mr. de Blasio and Ms. McCray are a ubiquitous tag team on the campaign trail; at times the candidate interrupts voters midsentence to introduce them to his wife, as he did with victims of
Hurricane Sandy in Far Rockaway a few days ago.
It can seem as if a moment is incomplete for him unless his wife has experienced it, too.
In Harlem recently, Mr. de Blasio was walking to his city-issued S.U.V., a large crowd of residents trailing behind, when he stopped and looked around, disoriented. Ms. McCray was not there.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Let the first lady through.”
