Former Rep. Gerry Studds Dies at Age 69

By JULIA WELLS

Former Massachusetts Rep. Gerry E. Studds, who for 12 straight terms represented the congressional district that includes the Cape and Islands, New Bedford and the South Shore, and whose affinity and affection for the Vineyard ran as deep as the Sound, died Oct. 14 at Boston University Medical Center. He had been hospitalized after collapsing Oct. 3 while walking his English springer spaniel Bonnie; the cause of death was complications from a blood clot in the lung. He was 69.

A ranking member of the House Democratic leadership who served as chairman of the committee on Merchant Marine and Fisheries from 1990-1994, Mr. Studds was a longtime champion of New England fishermen and the ocean environment. He was the major sponsor of the original Magnuson Act of 1973, which among other things created what is today known the 200-mile limit, the offshore boundary for U.S. fishing rights.

In 1996, his final year in office, Congress designated in his honor an 842-square-mile ocean area between Cape Ann and Cape Cod as the Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary.

He was also the first openly gay person elected to the U.S. Congress. And while he never lived on the Vineyard, for more than two decades it was the place in his district where time and again he came home. His well-known (and later widely imitated) practice of holding open meetings with his constituents was first launched on the Vineyard in 1973. Over the next 24 years, he would hold dozens of such meetings, which unfailingly attracted large audiences to engage in lively discussion with their intellectually agile, self-effacing congressman.

"You remind me what it is I'm doing and why I'm doing this. You send me back reinvigorated," he told one open meeting on the Vineyard in 1990.

In 1995, when he announced that he would not seek re-election, he again chose the Vineyard as his stage. "This is where that special trust... began," Mr. Studds said. "That is how you and I have always done our business - together, without fanfare, taking a little time to ask and explain and maybe even argue a little, and then rolling up our sleeves to get back to work."

Gerry Eastman Studds was born on May 12, 1937 in Mineola, Nassau County, N.Y., the son of the late Eastman Studds, an architect, and Beatrice Murphy Studds. He moved to Cohasset at the age of nine, where he attended Cohasset public schools. He subsequently attended Derby Academy in Hingham, and graduated from the Groton School in Groton.

He received a bachelor of arts degree in American Studies and an M.A.T. in History from Yale University in 1959 and 1961 respectively.

He served as a foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., from 1961 to 1963, when he joined the White House staff of President John F. Kennedy as executive assistant to the president's consultant for a domestic Peace Corps. During those years he served as Congressional liaison for the Domestic Peace Corps Task Force, chaired by Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Following President Kennedy's death, Mr. Studds became legislative assistant to U.S. Sen. Harrison Williams, a Democrat from New Jersey.

Between 1965 and 1969 he taught history, government and political science at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H.

He resumed his political activities in 1968 as New Hampshire coordinator for Sen. Eugene McCarthy's presidential primary campaign. He was elected a delegate to the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and served on its platform committee.

In 1970, he made his first run for Congress and lost narrowly to incumbent Republican Keith Hastings. That year's race was the closest in the nation. In preparation for the next campaign, Mr. Studds learned to speak Portuguese, the language of the New Bedford area community, and he studied issues related to the fishing industry.

On Nov. 7, 1972, Mr. Studds was elected to the 93rd Congress from the Massachusetts 12th Congressional District, the first Democrat to represent the district since 1914 and only the second in history. Once again, the race was the closest in the nation.

In 1974, he won re-election with 75 per cent of the vote - carrying every precinct and every town in the district.

The story would repeat itself over the next 20 years.

In 1982, he won re-election and carried the Vineyard with more than 82 per cent of the vote.

In 1983, he faced controversy when a 27-year-old former page revealed that he had had an affair with the congressman 10 years earlier.

Under investigation by the House Ethics Committee, Mr. Studds became the first national politician and member of Congress to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality. He was censured by the House and stripped of his subcommittee chairmanship. Beneath the harsh glare of the national media spotlight, Mr. Studds stood to admit and apologize for his indiscretions of a decade earlier.

For the people of the Vineyard, it was a time of torn emotions.

"Take Time for Judgment," warned the headline on the lead editorial in the Vineyard Gazette following the censure.

"I'm not sure what the cultural origin of our mores has to do with a good and decent man's ability to defend the fishing banks and the continental shelf against fat cats," declared Gazette columnist William A. Caldwell.

Selectmen in Oak Bluffs, West Tisbury and Chilmark wrote letters of endorsement for the popular congressman. The plainspoken Chilmark selectman Elizabeth Lima Bryant, one of his staunchest supporters, led the cause.

"Whatever his sexual preferences are, they make no difference to me," Mrs. Bryant said. "I like his position on Central America; he opposes intervention. He is opposed to the MX missile. He wants to protect the 200-mile limit. He cares deeply about people's basic needs."

For Mr. Studds, it was again a time to come home to the Vineyard.

One month after the censure and in his first open meeting since the controversy began, Mr. Studds faced an audience of more than 200 in the Tisbury School, where he was greeted with applause and expressions of support. "I love you," Island house painter Michael Creech said. "So much for your reputation," Mr. Studds shot back in trademark style.

But in serious tones, the congressman also spoke about his personal and professional dilemma.

"My overriding professional and personal obligation is to the people who elected me to represent them and this extraordinary district of Massachusetts," he said. "If I felt that these two obligations were contradictory, I must tell you quite honestly that I would be torn apart. But I feel profoundly that as I understand them, they are both fulfilled in exactly the same way. The obligation to gay people, the obligation I know I have to my constituency, they are both fulfilled by my being the best congressman I can possibly be."

Many predicted his political demise, but he survived and was re-elected the next year, in a redrawn district that was now the 10th Congressional District. With a newfound resolve and wisdom that sometimes springs from adversity, he continued on to represent his district aggressively and with passion for the things that mattered to residents in coastal places: fishing and protection of the ocean environment.

His leadership on the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act, known as the Studds Act, led to the recovery of an important resource in his district. He worked successfully to pass the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which gave federal protection to whales, dolphins and porpoises. He fought to limit oil drilling on Georges Bank and to safeguard financing for the Coast Guard. He sponsored legislation that created the Boston Harbor Islands National Recreation Area, bringing the 31 Boston Harbor Islands under control of the National Park Service.

In 1987, he was in line to assume the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs, but instead he opted for the interests of his district by accepting chairmanship of the fisheries subcommittee.

Mr. Studds also advocated for stronger federal response to the AIDS crisis. He was among the first members of Congress to endorse lifting the ban against gays and lesbians in the military. In 1994, he and Sen. Edward M. Kennedy introduced the Employment NonDiscrimination Act, aimed at ending employment discrimination in the workplace based on sexual orientation.

In addition to hosting more than 1,000 open meetings, he did many things directly in his district. He sponsored educational forums to help parents cope with the cost of higher education for their children. He conducted opinion surveys of his constituents on environmental issues, and then released the results to the press.

When Congress was in session, he wrote and published a weekly newsletter detailing his votes and positions on matters before the House of Representatives. Titled Report to the People, the newsletter was mailed every week to every district household - long before the age of electronic mail.

He captured the attention of the legendary Vineyard Gazette editor Henry Beetle Hough.

"Our present congressman, Gerry Studds, a young Democrat who overthrew a long Republican succession, is of a different mettle. He campaigns, he meets people, and he follows up on problems of importance," Mr. Hough wrote in his 1975 book Mostly on Martha's Vineyard.

In March 1985, Mr. Studds hosted an open meeting in the Katharine Cornell Theatre, and Vineyard Haven resident Gratia Harrington was seated in her usual spot in the front row. Two days shy of her 100th birthday, Mrs. Harrington had received letters of congratulations from her U.S. Senators. Mr. Studds dutifully read the proclamations and then confessed that he had not delivered all the mail, stepping down to hand Mrs. Harrington a large bunch of tulips.

"Did I do right?" he asked. "I could have brought you a letter from the president. But I had a terrible feeling there would be a scene."

Over the years, he received many awards from environmental and civil rights organizations in Massachusetts and across the country.

In 1995, he traveled to the Vineyard to announce that he would not run again.

"My decision is at its core personal, not political," he said in a lengthy address to more than 250 people.

He moved back to Provincetown where he had had a home since the early 1970s, and had been an accomplished sailor and fisherman. In 2002, he sold his home on Cape Cod and moved to Boston with his partner, Dean T. Hara. In 2004, they were among the first same-sex couples to be legally married in the commonwealth.

In addition to his husband and their springer spaniel, he is survived by a brother, Colin Studds of Cohasset; a sister, Gaynor Stewart of Buffalo, N.Y.; and four nephews.

A memorial service is planned for November, at a time and place to be announced.

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