Getting Mayor Bloomberg to say unequivocally where he stood on the issue of gay marriage had become a kind of sport among City Hall reporters this time last year. Journalists were in tacit agreement that during each of the mayor’s thrice-weekly question-and-answer sessions, at least one question on gay marriage should be posed. Then the scribes would dutifully write down the mayor’s latest duck-and-weave on the issue.

This weekend he stopped ducking.

“I think people have the right to love, to live with, and to marry whoever they want, regardless of their sexual orientation,” the mayor told an audience Saturday at a function of a gay rights group, the Human Rights Campaign. Then Mr. Bloomberg said he still had to appeal a state judge’s decision, handed down the day before, that would make gay marriage legal in New York.

According to Mr. Bloomberg’s aides, as soon as Justice Doris Ling-Cohan ruled Friday that a state law that denied gay couples the right to marry violated the state Constitution, paving the way for the city to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Mr. Bloomberg decided he needed to make clear where he stood. While he personally supported gay marriage – something he had never said publicly – he believed the state court’s ruling was not the way to achieve that goal, the mayor said.

The judge’s decision caught Mr. Bloomberg and his aides off-guard and put him in a position of having to choose between courting the city’s liberal majority and fending off challengers from his right in a campaign year.

In a series of telephone conversations Friday and Saturday, Mr. Bloomberg and the city’s corporation counsel, Michael Cardozo, ran through the options. Aides said Mr. Bloomberg wanted to understand, in particular, what would happen if the city did not appeal the State Supreme Court ruling. Mr. Cardozo assured him the city would face the same sorts of problems that plagued San Francisco when thou sands of same-sex couples flocked to its City Hall to be wed when it appeared that such marriages were legal. A court subsequently ruled that the marriages were not. Mr. Bloomberg said he didn’t want that to happen in New York.

By happenstance, two events before gay and lesbian groups were on his calendar for Saturday night, and while some press aides counseled the mayor to hold off on making any pronouncements just a day after the ruling was issued, Mr. Bloomberg was adamant about explaining not only his personal position but also the reasoning behind having the city appeal.

He and his aides decided to hold an impromptu press conference in Chinatown at lunchtime Saturday so that, in the words of one aide, “the evening audiences wouldn’t be stunned by his decision, but instead people would have a chance to digest it.”

Hours later, Mr. Bloomberg told two hostile crowds – the Human Rights Campaign and the Lesbian & Gay Pride Foundation – that he was appealing the decision because the ruling “was incorrect” and “the current state Constitution does not permit same-sex marriages.” He was heckled and booed by the two audiences, and his critics wasted no time in criticizing his attempt to have it both ways.

“Clearly his position on gay marriage is different from mine. I am against it,” Mr. Bloomberg’s likely Republican challenger in the primary, Thomas Ognibene, a former City Council minority leader, told The New York Sun. “When you try to straddle the fence, it always comes out badly. He could have just not appealed the ruling, and the gay community would have the certainty he claims to want for them. The marriages would have been legal. Instead he did a politically spineless thing and took both sides. It will cost him votes, and he’s proving again that clearly he doesn’t stand for Republican principles.”

Democratic challengers fired similar salvos.

“I think the mayor’s actions speak for themselves,” a former Bronx borough president, Fernando Ferrer, said. “There are people who have been denied equal rights for too many years. This is about saying what you mean and meaning what you say. I would not call him a coward. I would just say his position is so incredibly opportunistic. Trying to have it both ways means you are denying a lot of people their rights without showing leadership.”

The City Council speaker and another mayoral hopeful, Gifford Miller, said: “The mayor could issue those marriage licenses on Monday and then appeal the case. That happens all the time in court cases. So if he really believes that this is the right thing to do, then he should issue those licenses on Monday and let the Court of Appeals make that decision.”

The mayor’s spokesman, Edward Skyler, fired back. “No good would be served by the city issuing licenses that could later be nullified, as they were in San Francisco,” he said. “The mayor believes gay, lesbian, and transgender people have the right to marry and would lobby Albany to change the law, but he isn’t going to act irresponsibly and allow people to be hurt down the road.”

While those seeking to challenge the mayor saw his turns on gay marriage as a way of trying to have it both ways, political analysts saw it differently. They viewed Mr. Bloomberg’s willingness to go before a hostile crowd Saturday night and take an unpopular stand as an act of political courage and political maturation.

“I thought it was pretty bold and almost Giuliani-esque in its willingness to irritate the audience at the expense of showing a great deal of integrity when it came to one’s own point of view,” the president of the political consultancy the Advance Group, Scott Levenson, said. “If you are willing to bring bad news to an audience, it looks like you are not pandering. He reached the political calculation that allowing New York to become the Mecca for gay marriage wasn’t something he could politically afford, and in a broader way he didn’t think that would be good for the city.”

A political science professor at Baruch College, Douglas Muzzio, said Mr. Bloomberg had good reason to appeal the decision. “He scores twice,” Mr. Muzzio said of the mayor, “once with gays and once with people who give him credit for his nonideological administration of the law. I could see the interpretation that he is trying to have it both ways, but I don’t buy it. It is not compelling. His conscience is talking, and at the same time he is taking on his legal obligation for the city.”

It is too early to tell whether Mr. Bloomberg’s position will cost him votes. For Republicans who already thought the mayor was a Democrat in sheep’s clothing, his personal support for same-sex unions will hardly surprise them. Gay activists in the city said privately they sympathized with the mayor. While they want support for gay marriages, there is a widespread belief in the community that the dust-up caused by the San Francisco marriages didn’t help their cause, it hurt. Having New York rush to allow marriages that might only be rolled back later doesn’t make much sense, they said.