Until last week, when Republican San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders abruptly changed his position on same-sex marriage, announced that his daughter is a lesbian and signed a City Council resolution adding San Diego to a friend-of-the-court brief that urges the California Supreme Court to legalize same-sex marriage, few San Diegans, gay or straight, knew that Sanders’ daughter Lisa, 24, is a lesbian.

While Lisa has declined all interview requests from mainstream press, she offered comment to the Gay & Lesbian Times at a kickoff event for her father’s re-election campaign on Sept. 20, the day after Sanders made his turn-about announcement.

“I’m just very proud of my father,” Lisa Sanders said. “And to be a part of this. It’s about equality, and he’s doing the right thing, and I’m very confident in him.”

“I have close family members and friends who are a member of the gay and lesbian community,” Sanders said last week, fighting back tears. “Those folks include my daughter Lisa, as well as members of my personal staff.

Openly lesbian City Councilmember Toni Atkins, who steered the resolution through the council, said she is ecstatic at Sanders’ startling about-face, especially given that he had announced just a day earlier that he would veto the measure.

“I thought we were going to have to go through a veto override, and that would have been tough,” Atkins said in an interview. “We’d have had to hurry, as we would have been on a very tight timeline. The fact that he did this – it stopped me in my tracks in the most pleasant way.

Atkins said the mayor’s office has received a lot of positive e-mail and flowers of thanks.

“I know he’s getting some pushback from the other side as well,” she said. “But I believe it’s more positive than negative at this point.”

Indeed, at the Sept. 20 campaign-kickoff event, Sanders, who received 53.6 percent of the vote when he was elected, received applause and cheers when he said: “I wanted my family up here [onstage with me] because over the last couple of years their family life has changed fairly dramatically. Some more than others. Some in the last day or so.”

The court is expected to rule on a same-sex marriage case early next year.

It remains to be seen whether Sanders’ championing of same-sex marriage will affect his fortunes in next June’s nonpartisan primary election. Analysts say he may lose some votes from right-wing Republicans, while, at the same time, picking up support from liberals and the city’s sizable GLBT community, where he already was well-liked. The Gay & Lesbian Times named Sanders, along with Police Chief William Lansdowne, “Person of the Year” in 2006.

One likely Republican candidate, Steve Francis – who finished 3.5 percentage points behind Sanders in the June 2005 primary – would run to the right of Sanders, but even he supports same-sex civil unions. Possible Democratic candidate Denise Ducheney, who is now a state senator, supports same-sex marriage and is politically to the left of Sanders.

In one scenario, Sanders’ support for same-sex marriage could push some percentage of conservatives toward Francis while Ducheney could draw much of the liberal vote, leaving Sanders squeezed in the middle. In San Diego’s nonpartisan primary, if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote, the top two vote-getters advance to a runoff election.

San Diego has 224,397 registered Democratic voters, 190,647 registered Republican voters, 141,090 registered voters who “decline to state” a political affiliation, and 27,000 voters registered with minor parties.

Sanders’ same-sex-marriage position also might make no difference at all. San Diego is no longer the conservative city it once was. As the nation’s eighth-largest city, we have a lesbian city councilmember and a lesbian state senator. The fire chief is a lesbian. The Republican district attorney is a lesbian. Two superior court judges are gay. Mayor Sanders’ press secretary is a gay man. So is his deputy press secretary.

“Sanders’ emotional statement brought me – and I know millions of other gay and lesbian people – to tears,” said executive director Matt Foreman. “Mayor Sanders will go into the history books as a profile in courage and conviction.”