Senate President Stan Rosenberg married longtime partner, Bryon Hefner, earlier this week.
The nuptials were confirmed by Rosenberg’s office and by a marriage certificate on file with the City of Cambridge under Rosenberg’s name but not available to the public.
“Senate President Stan Rosenberg and his longtime partner Bryon Hefner were married in a private ceremony in Cambridge on Tuesday,” Mara Dolan, Rosenberg’s communications director, told WGBH News Friday.
As the first openly gay leader of a Legislative chamber in Massachusetts, Rosenberg is the first to take advantage of same-sex couples’ right to marry first established in the Commonwealth in 2004. First elected to the Senate in 1991, the Amherst Democrat took over the Senate gavel in 2015 after serving as majority leader under former Senate President Therese Murray.
Rosenberg, 66, proposed to Hefner, 29, in February of 2015. The couple has been together since 2008. Hefner is a special assistant to Alan Klein, president of the Robert F. Kennedy Children’s Action Corps, and worked previously as an account executive at Regan Communications Group and as a State House aide.
Rosenberg was in Park City, Utah, Friday for a conference on government intervention to combat the opiate drug epidemic.
A series of Boston Globe articles in 2015 created a firestorm around Hefner when accusations arose that he had used anonymous social media accounts to criticize Murray. Rosenberg vowed to maintain a “firewall” between his professional and personal lives as he took over the Senate following Murray’s departure.
Another Globe story from March 2015 stated that Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito would officiate the couple’s nuptials.
In February 2015, the pair danced to Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” before Rosenberg gave a monogrammed handkerchief to Hefner as a proposal gift, according to the State House News Service.
Dolan issued a full statement about the wedding:
“Massachusetts Senate President Stan C. Rosenberg (D-Amherst) married his longtime partner, Bryon Hefner, at Cambridge City Hall, Cambridge Massachusetts in a private ceremony on September 6th, 2016.”
