Burstein, a 52-year-old Manhattan resident, has been running as a candidate committed to inclusion. "If we can get past the politics of identity, we can move toward the politics of community," she said last month, minutes after her three rivals for the Democratic nomination conceded defeat.
A founding member of the Lesbian and Gay Judges Association, she has made no secret of her sexual orientation; nor, however, has she--or her opponents, for that matter--made it an issue in the campaign so far.
"She always runs as the most qualified candidate, not as a woman, not as a Jew, not as a lesbian," said Leslie Wells, the coordinator of lesbigay issues for the campaign. "When people ask her in interviews or questions on the street, 'Is it true you are a lesbian?,' she says, 'Yes, it's true,' and sort of neutralizes the issue."
Burstein has been involved in what might most broadly be called "civil rights" since her days at Bryn Mawr College. She did postgraduate work in race relations at Fisk University in Nashville, where she also taught the first integrated public high school class in Tennessee. She marched for black voting rights in Selma and later joined the fight of migrant farmworkers to obtain the right to vote, too. She was an anti-Vietnam War activist and, while at Fordham Law School, was a leader of the Student Strike for Peace.
Prior to becoming a Family Court judge in 1990, she had made a name for herself as a state senator from Long Island, the chair of the Governor's Task Force on Domestic Violence and the president of the New York State Civil Service Commission. She successfully eliminated sexual orientation as a basis for discrimination in state government hiring and authored laws to protect battered women and children.
If elected attorney general--the state's chief legal officer--on Nov. 8, she has pledged to work toward passage of a state gay rights bill, to fight for the rights of people with AIDS, and to seek extension of health coverage to domestic partners.
Anyone interested in volunteering in Burstein's campaign--doing everything from fundraising to leafleting to stuffing envelopes--may contact Wells at (212) 696-9308.
- E. R. Shipp