Dale
McCormick (born January 17, 1947) is an American politician from the state of
Maine who currently serves on the city council of Augusta. Queer Places:
University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242
Dale McCormick is profiled in ''Family: a portrait of gay and lesbian America'', by Nancy Andrews (1994).
McCormick was the first openly gay member of the Maine State Legislature, having been elected in 1990 to the first of three terms in the Maine Senate. A Democrat, she represented a largely rural district that included her then-residence in Hallowell. After narrowly losing a congressional bid, she served as state treasurer and as director of the Maine State Housing Authority.
Born in New York City in 1947, McCormick moved to Sigourney, Iowa in 1955 after her parents got divorced. She graduated from Sigourney High School in 1965 before attending the University of Iowa where she graduated in 1970 with a BA and a teaching certificate. After graduation, she stayed in Iowa City, Iowa and apprenticed as a carpenter, becoming the first journeywoman carpenter in the nation in 1975. In 1977, she wrote and illustrated Against the Grain: A Carpentry Manual for Women and set up her own construction and cabinetry company.[1]
MMcCormick moved to Maine in the early 1980s, where she founded a job training program for women in trade and technical occupations. She actively involved herself in political issues and was elected one of Maine's delegates to the 1984 Democratic National Convention in San Francisco as well as the 1988 convention in Atlanta.
In 1990, McCormick ran against and defeated incumbent state senator Norman Weymouth, a Republican from West Gardiner. She took office in December 1990 as the representative of the 18th senate district, which consisted of parts of Kennebec County as well as the town of Richmond in Sagadahoc County. She was re-elected in 1992 and 1994.
In 1996, she did not seek re-election to the state senate but instead ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1st district. She lost the Democratic primary to Tom Allen, winning 10,071 votes to his 13,632.[2] Allen went on to win the general election handily and served six terms in Congress.
McCormick was elected state treasurer by the legislature on December 4, 1996, becoming Maine's first female constitutional officer.[3] She was re-elected in 1998, 2000 and 2002. Term limits prevented her from seeking a fifth term in 2004. Gov. John Baldacci subsequently appointed her director of the Maine State Housing Authority.
In 2011, McCormick and her Agency were criticized by MSHA board members appointed by Republican Governor Paul LePage, and ex-officio board member State Treasurer Bruce Poliquin, also a Republican. They accused the MSHA of improper spending of money they felt was inconsistent with the agency's mission, such as donating money to a theater group for ex-convicts, money for massage services for MSHA employees, and money given to groups viewed as left-leaning. McCormick felt the accusations were politically motivated and hurt the ability of the agency to do its job. The Maine Legislature then asked the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability (OPEGA) to conduct an expedited review of MSHA's finances. Before the review was completed, McCormick resigned her position, feeling that the continued criticism was a distraction to the agency's work. She also may have been influenced to resign due to the progress of a proposed bill in the Legislature which would have granted the MSHA Board the ability to hire and fire the agency's director at will, including McCormick.[4] The OPEGA review later found that there was no fraud committed by the agency, though it did question some unnecessary expenditures.[5]
McCormick took out papers in 2013 to seek an at-large seat on the Augusta City Council,[6] which she won in the November 5th election.[7]
Dale McCormick, forty-six, was among the first females to become a journeyman carpenter. She has written two books on carpentry and founded a statewide nonprofit organization, Women Unlimited, which trains women in trade and technical jobs. In 1990, Dale was elected Maine's first and only openly lesbian state senator. She and her partner, Betsy, live in Monmouth. Dale was photographed in the basement of her home, which she is in the process of building. I wanted to make a difference. My decision to run was the slow eradication of many barriers, both internally and externally created. If you went back to my high school annual, it says, "Dale will be the first lady vice-president of the United States." Which I think is telling—one, because they had to say "lady" because of the time; and, secondly, they couldn't have me be the president because of course that would have been too much for the time. When I realized I was a lesbian, which happened maybe two or three years later when I was nineteen, I thought all that was not possible for me. I thought many things were not possible for me. It took maybe twenty years to slowly get that back. When the Webster decision came down from the Supreme Court and the issue of reproductive choice was thrown back to the states, I began to realize that my internalized homophobia was a petty reluctance and that I—living in the Senate district of the ten-year incumbent, right-wing point man for the Christian Civic League—that it would make a difference if he wasn't there and I was there instead. I won the election, though my opponent gay-baited me from day one, continually brought it up. I had death threats on the phone machine. I felt very vulnerable that whole time. It's like being naked in a glass house—just very hard emotionally that way. There was always this negative outpouring of energy from the right-wingers in the district and the fundamentalists. They wrote letters to the editor about Satan and Sodom and Gomorrah and "insult to womanhood." But that created a much greater reaction from the forces of light in the district, who wrote in saying wonderful things. In my next election my next opponent, having learned from that, decided to be very nice. My opponent didn't raise the gay issue at all. It dropped off from being an issue almost immediately upon my election. It was hardly ever mentioned. It just went away to the point where I even forgot about it. I really think running for office is great therapy for getting rid of internalized homophobia. I basically have periods of time when I forget that I am a lesbian. I hardly have ever in my life, ever, lived like that. I don't mean forget as in ignore, but to forget as in "be just as good as everybody else." And just as entitled to all the things everybody else is entitled to. It's a self-esteem thing. I think that's what internalized homophobia is: you self-select yourself out of things because you think they are closed to you—relationships with children, personal conversations, or touching someone when you think that might be misconstrued. It's constantly being aware of who you are rather than reacting purely from your center. I think that's true for everyone.
My published books:
