Massachusetts State Senator Julian Cyr (Cape & Islands) made MassLive’s list of (just 12 political) Leaders to Watch from 2025.

“Cyr, who is gay, got involved with LGBTQ health organizing while an undergraduate at New York University. Work with the Clinton Global Initiative and former Gov. Deval Patrick’s campaign followed,” says MassLive in their profile of the senator.

“His most valuable experience, he recalled, may have come from working at his family’s restaurant [Adrian’s in Provincetown’s neighboring Truro]. ‘If you can wrangle a vacationer in August, you can be a state senator,’”’ he said with a laugh.”

Reports MassLive.com:

It’s already well-established that a crisis of housing affordability and access is one of the Bay State’s biggest public policy challenges. Last year, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey signed a massive housing bond bill into law that will go a long way toward addressing it.

And now, as the Senate’s chairperson of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Housing, state Sen. Julian Cyr is going to have a big say in how that bill gets implemented and how housing policy will be shaped for the next two years.

“Housing is the most urgent challenge facing our region and the commonwealth,” Cyr, D-Cape and Islands, told The Inquirer and Mirror on Nantucket last month. “Young people, families and even businesses are being priced out of our communities because we’ve fallen behind on housing.”

The senator has also focused on health care policy and, in February, filed An Act to ensure health care as a right, a bill that calls for a study to determine the feasibility of a single-payer health care system in Massachusetts.

Cyr, 39, of Provincetown, serves as assistant majority whip as a member of the Senate’s leadership team. His district spans 19 communities on the Cape, Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.

He started his political career when he was a junior at Nauset Regional High School. That year, the district faced deep budget cuts if the community didn’t pass a property tax override vote. The fate of 40 teachers and staff, including Cyr’s beloved choir teachers, were on the line, he told MassLive in a 2023 interview.

“So I led a group of students to run a campaign to convince voters to approve the override, and we were successful,” he recalled. “That was the first time where I realized where I could step into my community and really instigate change.”

Read the complete MassLive.com story here.

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