Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown will become the state's governor, after sitting Governor John Kitzhaber announced Friday he would resign due to a corruption scandal. She will take office on Wednesday, February 18.
Brown, who is bisexual, will be the only current openly LGBT governor of a US state, and the second LGBT governor in US history (after New Jersey's Jim McGreevey, who announced he was gay shortly before resigning).
A few years after joining the state legislature in the early 1990s, Brown was outed by an Oregon newspaper. "I got a call the night before and they said we're gonna print that you're bisexual in a story," Brown says in the documentary. "So it was definitely a forced coming out."
No out LGBT politician has ever been elected governor of a US state.
Good for her and the state of Oregon.