Atlanta City council member Matt Westmoreland’s name appeared in article after article on the eve of his second term, right after he came out to the public as gay. It was a historic moment, as he became the fourth openly gay member to serve on the city council that term — the highest number of openly LGBTQ members the city has ever seen.
While this headline-making moment was just over a year ago, Westmoreland has been serving the Atlanta community as a leader for far longer than that.
Westmoreland was elected to his first term on the city council in 2017 and reelected for a second term in 2021. Prior to that position, he served for four years on the Atlanta Board of Education, where he represented the Eastern 6th District from 2013 to 2017. Westmoreland said that he was prompted to run for the position after teaching at Carver High School for three and a half years.
“My decision to go into the classroom was largely influenced by my experience as a student in Atlanta Public Schools,” Westmoreland, who spent all of his pre-college years in the Atlanta Public School (APS) system, told Georgia Voice.
Westmoreland said that it was during his time as a student at Grady High School that he started to notice the inequalities between students that existed within the school.
“My experiences at APS are what sent me to Princeton … but I saw at Grady that that wasn’t true for everybody at my own school,” he said.
After serving on the school board, Westmoreland noticed that there were issues within the APS system that could be fixed with collaboration between the Atlanta Board of Education and the Atlanta City Council. Taking the initiative to start this collaboration between the two different groups, Westmoreland decided to run for council himself.
“I honestly wanted to try and find a way to bridge better collaboration and teamwork between the school system and the city government, and to help make an impact on the issues that were impacting kids and families in Atlanta on a daily basis,” he said.
In terms of his decision to come out in early 2022, Westmoreland said it was prompted by a “soul-searching” process that he went through in 2021, which provided clarity on who he was and how he identifies.
“I felt like, given the fact that I held an elected role and that I was a city-wide representative, this was something about me that I had finally wrestled with and fully realized,” Westmoreland said.
Referring back to his background in education, his former students were a major factor he considered in deciding to come out publicly.
“Part of why I felt like I should share this was to show young folks that we’ve now got four members on city council that identify as members of the LGBTQ community,” he said. “There’s power in that, and [I] wanted to share my story in such a way if, at whatever age you are, you’re wrestling or struggling with who you are, [you’ll] have some courage to do that.”
Westmoreland said he felt it made sense to come out at the beginning of a new year and a new term. Along with that, he wanted the freedom to openly be with his partner — Malik Brown, the Director of the Mayor’s Division of LGBTQ Affairs — without feeling like he had to hide the relationship or go back into the closet.
Westmoreland said that the reaction he’s received from his constituents and fellow council members has been overwhelmingly positive and that he doesn’t feel that he’s been treated any different from his first term because of his sexuality.
While the Atlanta City Council could be doing more to make running for office more welcoming and accessible to members of the LGBTQ community, Westmoreland said he’s proud of the work that the council has done over the past few years to make the body more diverse in terms of race, sexuality, and gender.
Westmoreland plans to continue to work on legislation that will help protect and advocate for the LGBTQ community, something he did during his first term as well. One project in particular that he mentioned was a collaboration between the city council and the Atlanta Legal Aid fund, which helped provide name change services to trans folks for little or no cost.