Openly gay Patrick appointee to be arraigned on sexual assault charges

Carl Stanley McGee, assistant secretary for policy and planning in Gov. Deval Patrick's administration and one of Patrick's first openly gay appointees, will be arraigned Feb. 25 in Fort Myers, Fla., on suspicion of committing sexual assault on a 15-year-old.

Police with the Lee County Sheriff's office arrested McGee Dec. 28 after receiving a call from a man at a hotel in Boca Grande reporting that his 15-year-old son had been sexually assaulted. According to the police report, the alleged victim told police that McGee approached him in the hotel steam room, masturbated in front of him, and then forcibly performed oral sex on him. McGee was still at the hotel spa when police arrived, and they arrested him.

McGee's attorney, Charles Rankin, did not return a phone call to comment for this story,

McGee, an attorney, Harvard Law alum and a Rhodes Scholar, was tapped by Patrick in January 2007 to work for Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Daniel O'Connell last year, becoming one of the first - and highest-ranking - openly gay officials in the administration.

Kofi Jones, a spokeswoman for O'Connell, said that McGee has been on unpaid administrative leave since Jan. 27 and will remain so "pending the outcome of this matter."

Prior to joining the Patrick administration McGee was a key activist in MassEquality's campaign to defeat a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, serving as director of the organization's business and civic initiative, which recruited some of the state's top names in business to talk publicly about their support for marriage equality. McGee won praise for his work from MassEquality Campaign Director Marc Solomon, who told Bay Windows in an interview last year that, "Making the pitch to CEOs is not the kind of thing that [just] anyone can do. Stan had the unique ability to be able to make contacts with these folks; he was relentless in his pursuit of business leaders. ...And then he could speak to them in a peer-to-peer way."

McGee is married to John Finley IV, an Episcopal priest associate. They were recently profiled in the gay magazine Boston Spirit, in a feature on gay "power couples."