Mayor for a New America (23 page)

Chick-fil-A wanted to come to Boston. What did I think of that? a reporter asked. Not much, I said. The owner, Dan T. Cathy, had contributed nearly $2 million to anti–gay rights groups. I didn't want his business in my city.

The ACLU slammed me: I couldn't ban a business for the owner's political opinions. No, but the ruckus I raised scared Chick-fil-A away from opening a franchise in Boston. Months after everybody had forgotten about Chick-fil-A, I got a note from Mr. Cathy asking me to give the enclosed to the Perkins School for the Blind, one of my favorite local charities. It was a check for $500,000.

 

Gays did not have to travel beyond the city limits to find people who agreed with Dan Cathy. Some of those opponents of equal rights ran the St. Patrick's Day parade held in South Boston since 1901. The holiday celebrated on March 17 is a day for the Irish behind the beard of Evacuation Day, when George Washington, with cannon placed in Southie, drove the British out of Boston. 

Fidel Castro was once invited to march in the St. Patrick's Day parade, but aside from that and the usual public drunkenness, the parade stayed out of trouble until 1992, when the organizers told gays they could not march.

The gays were in good company. In 1946 Charlie MacGillivary was rejected when he ran for chief marshal of the parade, and he was a Medal of Honor winner. Charlie was born in Canada: The South Boston Citizens' Association didn't want any damn Canuck leading their parade. Not even one who had lost an arm fighting for the USA.

Veterans protested Charlie's treatment to Mayor Curley, who ruled that from then on, the parade's sponsor would be the South Boston Allied War Veterans Council.

This was the outfit that, in 1992, banned the Irish-American
Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Pride Committee from their parade. The gay leaders “would not guarantee they would act in a decent way,” said a parade committee official, John “Wacko” Hurley. “We didn't know what they would be up to during the march.”

After the gays promised the police in writing not to throw condoms at Catholics or commit other outrages, Mayor Ray Flynn said that settled the public safety issue. He called on the vets to let the twenty-five-member gay group march. I was a city councilor then, and I supported the right of gay Irish Americans to join a parade honoring Irish America.

A week before the parade, the gays filed a lawsuit against the Veterans Council, the city, and the mayor. The city because it contributed $8,000 to pay for marching bands and allowed parade organizers to use the city seal on their stationery. A Suffolk Superior Court judge, Hiller Zobel, ruled that the gays had a right to march.

“The Court is satisfied, the marchers are satisfied, and the people of South Boston are satisfied,” declared Mayor Flynn, who lived in South Boston. He predicted a “safe, peaceful, fun family day.” He wished he could join in, but on the day of the parade he'd be in Northern Ireland, where, he joked, he'd feel “safer” than in Boston.

For the twenty-five gay marchers, that was no joke. They endured a “near-relentless storm of abuse,” the Globe reported. “For the entire length of the parade, attended by an estimated 600,000 spectators, scores of youths surged down sidewalks in pursuit of gay marchers, sometimes urged on by older spectators yelling ‘get them.'” People shouted, “We hate you!” and “Hope you die of AIDS!” They turned their backs on the gays. Gave them the finger. A few flung smoke bombs. One marcher was hit in the face by a rock.

Showing courage, the gays waved and shouted, “Happy Saint Patrick's Day!” Afterward, Barbra Kay, chairwoman of the group, said: “I was really proud to be there. Nothing I heard today was something that I haven't heard before; gay men, lesbians and bisexuals live with harassment every day.”

Passing through Dublin, Ray Flynn said, he “picked up the leading newspaper in all of Ireland and the headline was: ‘Corridors of Hatred in Boston.'” Gays had marched in the St. Patrick's Day parade in Cork, where his ancestors were from, and gays would march in Boston: “Were going to have a parade in Boston that is going to be inclusive—open to anyone who wants to abide by the rules. That's the way it's going to be.”

Before the 1993 parade, lawyers for the veterans sued to have gay marchers banned. Gays were offensive to the “traditional values” of the parade. To let the gays participate would violate the vets' “freedom of expression.”

Judge Zobel again sided with the gays. “The history of the parade shows it to be a secular event,” he wrote. He noted the number of non-Irish groups signed up for that year's parade, including a troupe of clowns from New Hampshire, and concluded that the vets “as permit holders, are . . . merely the custodians of a civic tradition.”

So gays marched in 1993. But not City Councilor at-Large Albert L. “Dapper” O'Neil. “For the first time in many years,” he declared, “I will not be part of the parade, because I will not have my nose rubbed into their way of living.” The small band of gays were cursed, spat on, and pelted with snowballs. Vendors sold T-shirts printed with the words 90
YEARS WITH NO QUEERS
. That was the last parade I marched in.

As mayor in 1994 I tried to bring the two sides together. But when the Supreme Judicial Court found that the gay marchers could not be banned, the vets canceled the parade. “They will never, ever march down the streets of South Boston as a group again,” said Wacko.

At the eleventh hour, I tried to persuade other South Boston citizens' groups to sponsor the parade. I got no takers. Finally, I announced a substitute celebration (minus the green beer) at City Hall Plaza and said that, if necessary, the city would sponsor the 1995 parade.

“I'm struck by Menino's willingness to stand up for what he believes in,” said a board member of the Greater Boston Lesbian and Gay Political Alliance. “That's real significant for us. We didn't get that kind of support from Flynn.”

 

Seven times state courts ruled that gays should have “equality of access” to the parade, a “civic celebration.” But in January 1995 a federal judge sided with Wacko and the vets, who had come up with a new constitutional angle: Their lawyers made over the St. Patrick's Day parade into a protest march.

“The 1995 parade will protest the decisions of the courts of the Commonwealth,” wrote U.S. District Court judge Mark L. Wolf. “Speech addressing such matters is at the core of self-expression that the First Amendment is intended to protect.” If the gays marched, “the veterans' protest would be confused and muted; indeed, the veterans' protest would be silenced because they would cancel the parade again.”

“In essence, what the judge ruled is that the St. Patrick's Day parade no longer exists,” Mary Bonauto, a gay rights lawyer, commented. “The veterans destroyed the parade in order to save it. It is no longer a parade, but an anti-gay protest.” Parade officials would wear black armbands, and an opening motorcade would fly black flags.

Wacko Hurley was confident that the U.S. Supreme Court would uphold Judge Wolf's ruling. Regardless, the protest/parade would go on. “If necessary, we'll protest the rest of our lives,” he said.

When a group of former servicemen suffering from AIDS applied to march, Wacko turned them down. Asked why, he said: “We don't give reasons. It's our parade.” Asked where he got his nickname, he said: “I was born with it. . . . If you find out where it comes from, you let me know.”

My office released this statement: “The federal court has ruled very directly on the 1995 parade, ordering the city to give the veterans a permit. The City is now obligated to comply with the judge's ruling and will do so.”

“I am not planning to march in the parade,” I said. “Many South Boston residents will be attending events which are open to all and I feel my time should be spent with them.” One year Angela and I were invited to a St. Patrick's Day reception at the home of Bill Bulger, the veteran South Boston legislator. A burly guy started in on me about the awful gays (only he didn't say “gays”). Bill's wife, Mary, stepped between us and straightened him out: The mayor is a guest in our house. You are way out of line. Please leave now. He did. Occasionally we'd even drop by Wacko Hurley's house party for banter and green bagels. Principled differences—yes. But when politicians read their opponents out of the human race, they give the rest of us a bad example.

My stand on the parade hurt an old pal. “I feel like I've been slapped in the face by a friend,” said Jimmy Kelly, Southie's city councilor. “Menino turned his back on an awful lot of good and decent people in order to be politically correct.” The papers speculated that my decision not to march “caused a rupture in the mayor's friendship with Kelly.” Certainly it made a rift.

I laid down a policy followed for the next two decades. City workers could not participate in the march. City emblems could not be shown. And, except for public safety during it and street cleanup after, city money could not be spent on the parade.

“I am gratified by the mayor's leadership on this issue,” said Cathleen Finn, spokeswoman for GLIB, the Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston. “It is clear that anyone who participates in the parade is serving to legitimize discrimination.” A Globe editorial called my ban on on-duty city workers representing Boston at the parade “courageous.”

 

June 10, 1995, was the silver anniversary of Boston Gay and Lesbian Pride Day, commemorating the Stonewall Riots in 1969, when police beat gay men resisting arrest at a Greenwich Village bar. Over 100,000 spectators lined the streets of downtown, the South End, and the Back Bay watching—and cheering—thousands of marching gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender men and women. Many wore T-shirts reading
CLOSETS ARE FOR CLOTHES
. “Times have changed since I first marched in the 70s,” one man said. “It is not so much a political event as a celebration. We're out and proud today.”

I was proud that my friend Harry Collings, director of development at the Fenway Community Health Center, was a grand marshal of the parade.

It was Boston's first Dyke March, with a large contingent of lesbians joining the parade in Copley Square. From a stage in front of the Old South Church on Boylston Street, a few hundred feet from where the first bomb exploded in April 2013, I told the marchers: “Twenty-five years of progress and positive change have passed since those brave gay men and lesbians marched up Charles Street in 1970. . . . Your strength in numbers today sends a loud and clear message that every single person in this wonderfully diverse city matters. . . . We all know that the mean-spiritedness must stop.”

In 2014, for the twentieth year in a row, Wacko & Co. kept gays from marching in the St. Patrick's Day parade. So the mean-spiritedness hasn't stopped. But it will stop. Gays will march. As the Yiddish saying has it, Where there's mortality, there's hope.

 

Usually I marched in the Gay Pride parade. But in 2013 I was sidelined by the broken leg that, three days before the Marathon bombing, landed me in the hospital. Angela took my place. Recuperating at the Parkman House, I watched the parade from a wheelchair inside the vestibule. A young woman, spotting me, left the marchers, ran across Beacon Street, and bounded up the stone steps. She wanted to thank me, she said. Years before, rejected by her parents, she'd left her hometown and come to Boston, a stranger. But, she said, beginning to cry, I'd helped her feel that Boston was her home. She wiped her tears, squeezed my hand, and rejoined the parade. As I battle cancer, her words bring me contentment.

Chapter 4

Cities and metropolitan areas are on their own. The cavalry is not coming.

 

—from
The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce

Katz and Jennifer Bradley

 

I
N THE
new America, cities have to supply their own cavalry. Mayor Mike Bloomberg stated their challenge this way: “As a result of [the federal] leadership vacuum, cities around the country have had to tackle our economic problems largely on our own.”

A partisan standoff paralyzed economic policy after the Tea Party won control of the House in the 2010 elections. With millions unemployed, Washington did nothing. Scratch that. To block “Oba­macare,” the Tea Party shut down the government and threatened to destroy the nation's credit.

Project the Tea Party backward. Suppose those radicals were in office in 2008–9, when the financial crisis morphed into a recession. Almost certainly they would have blocked the policies that prevented “the worst recession since the Great Depression” from turning into a second Great Depression—President George W. Bush's loan program to prop up the tottering banking system and President Barack Obama's $800 billion stimulus to revive the economy.

Now project the Tea Party roadblock forward: In the next recession, the federal cavalry won't be coming to rescue the economy.

That's the situation I faced in 1994. The nation was slowly emerging from recession. Boston was still mired in its worst slump since the 30s, having lost 25,000 good-paying manufacturing jobs in the 80s and 75,000 jobs of all kinds since 1988. The economy needed action, but Washington wouldn't act. In the 1992 election campaign, candidate Bill Clinton promised to restore growth by deficit spending on infrastructure. But after his spending plan bogged down in Congress, President Clinton made deficit reduction his top economic priority. Boston was on its own. “How the public sector can help stimulate economic growth is the crucial question facing the next mayor,” said the Reverend Charles Stith, a respected voice of the African American community.