With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (11 page)

C
hief of staff to a City Council member” may sound like a big title, but in truth I was the chief cook and bottle washer. The offices for councilmembers were, and still are, not big. We had a staff of three or four. My job was to manage the staff, oversee the legislative and budget work, coordinate the press and the scheduler, and oversee the staff’s work with constituents and the local community boards.

New York City has a total of fifty-nine community boards with about fifty members each. Community boards have an advisory role on everything from transportation to zoning. In our district, we basically had three community boards (and small pieces of two others—community board and City Council districts don’t cover exactly the same territory), and we were expected to have staff people at all their meetings. There are a lot of community board and other community meetings, and if we failed to send somebody to a meeting, it would not go unnoticed.

My father, who often volunteered to answer the phone at our district office, tells the story of a community board member who called to complain. They’d had a subcommittee meeting of some kind the night before, and the board member said, “Duane’s office wasn’t there.”

“No, you’re mistaken, I know we were there,” my father said.

“I have the attendance list right here in front of me, and you
weren’t
!” the caller replied. It was
that
kind of district, so you did your best to make sure you had a staffer at every meeting and every place they needed to be. People really care, and they demand and should get attention. That’s what makes our city great.

A flood of letters came in from constituents, and to deal with them, I developed a system to make sure that nothing slipped through the cracks. In those days, constituent complaints and requests came by regular mail, and there were thousands of them. A staff member would photocopy the front cover of every piece of mail that got forwarded to them, and that copy would go into its own folder for the staff person to deal with. We’d meet once a week to go through the folders. If the constituent’s problem had been addressed, we’d take the copy out of the folder and close the case. If there were still issues, we’d write ways to deal with the problem on the copy. The designated staff person would follow up that week. The next week we’d go through the folders again, so that ultimately everything would be addressed in some way or another.

I’ve always said to staff who work with constituents that even if you don’t have an immediate answer, it’s better to call that person back or write to them and say, for example, “I’m waiting to hear from the Department of Buildings, and I share your frustration over the delay.” Because what the constituent wants, besides an answer to his or her question, is to know that they’re being heard.

I believe it’s essential to respond to every letter, e-mail, and phone call that comes in from constituents, and to do so in a timely way. The person who takes time out of a busy day to write a letter to their elected official deserves to have it recognized and to know that the people who work for them are paying attention to them. Your constituents are your customers, your clients, and the people you work for. It’s their government, and they’re paying for it. If you don’t respond, you wind up forever coloring a citizen’s opinion of government in a negative way. This management technique turns up in successful customer-oriented businesses, but back then we were devising seat-of-the-pants solutions to problems that mattered to us.

For Tom, constituent work came naturally, but he faced the same kind of challenge that almost every new councilmember faces: figuring out how to go from who you were before you were elected—usually some type of neighborhood activist—to this new position, where you not only have to represent your district and your local constituency but you are also expected to weigh in on broader, citywide issues. Tom was particularly interested in neighborhood preservation and land use. And because he was the first openly gay and openly HIV-positive councilmember, he was very interested in promoting domestic partnership legislation. He was the strongest voice in the council for issues concerning HIV and AIDS. He felt a particular responsibility to represent all New Yorkers affected by HIV and AIDS and who were LGBT, because he could do it with the kind of authority and passion that no one else on the council could.

Like all elected official’s offices, we needed to build support for Tom’s work by getting press, and here my high school and college experiences came in handy. Our great mix of people and our funny and flexible councilmember came up with all kinds of ways to get people to pay attention to our issues. Some were great and impossible, and some were worth a try. For example, for a health-care press conference on the issue of getting growth hormones out of milk, we had someone dress up like a cow and stand on the steps of City Hall.

Another time we went after landlords who were failing to take care of their buildings or harassing their tenants to get them to move out so they could raise their rents. We had a slogan, “Landlords are skunks, they make our neighborhood stink,” which was accurate, if a bit harsh, and it got people’s attention. For that press conference and picket, we had someone dress up like a skunk. Then there was the (not so)famous turkey episode. Later, when I was on the council, we found out that the old McBurney YMCA, which used to be on Twenty-third Street, was selling its building and was going to evict its tenants from the SRO. It was all going to happen around Thanksgiving. So we had our intern dress up in a turkey costume to get attention for our protest.

I was always renting costumes. Was this a holdover from my Sports Nights and from my year as Trinity’s Bantam mascot? Or was it just fun? It was all of the above, and it was good for getting press attention. We learned from other elected officials that if you did a press conference on a Sunday, which is often a slow news day, and you had someone dressed in a costume to illustrate an important campaign issue, you’d usually get press.

D
aily life in a City Council office was generally driven by what was on the calendar: hearings, budget meetings, and community board meetings. If tenants in the district were having a problem with their landlord, you might see whether there was a legislative solution to their issue. In general, for a new councilmember, it’s very hard to get any kind of legislation passed because you don’t have seniority. Our activist experience made us also look for things we could get done ourselves, by organizing.

Here is an example. There were several terrible tenements on West Twenty-second Street, owned by two guys who, simply put, were slumlords. A lot of people living in these buildings had been placed there by the Division of AIDS Services. (DAS provides key support for city residents living with HIV and AIDS, ranging from referral to support groups and medical providers, to help with finding housing and financial resources.) Even though these owners were getting a ton of money in rent from the city to house people living with HIV and AIDS, they were providing extremely substandard living conditions. This was a perennial problem, and unfortunately it still exists to some degree.

So we organized what turned out to be a multiyear effort to get them to clear up the violations on their buildings or to sell them to responsible owners, which is what they eventually were forced to do. This campaign lasted for so long that we were still working on it by the time I took over Tom’s seat on the City Council.

After I was elected, we got a local morning television news show,
Good Day New York,
to do a story about how these awful landlords weren’t providing heat in the dead of winter. We arranged to do the story in the freezing-cold apartment of a DAS client in one of these buildings. I showed up at the apartment at five-thirty or six a.m., and he had the kitchen stove blasting heat because he didn’t want it to be cold for the television crew! He was being considerate to us and the crew. I said, “Turn off the stove! Open the windows!” We couldn’t do a story about a freezing apartment if it was eighty degrees inside!

A
nother citywide issue I got involved in through Tom’s office back in the day still isn’t resolved: New York City’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. When Tom was first running for office in 1991, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) applied to be a contingent in the parade, but its application was denied on ostensibly procedural grounds that made no sense at all. Procedure was obviously not the real issue. The people who run the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, see it as a Catholic parade. They don’t want LGBT people included in any visible way. The fact that actively Irish LGBT people exist didn’t make any difference to them. Lawsuits followed, and the Hibernians have not budged in the two decades since.

Once Tom was elected, for the first St. Patrick’s Day he was in office, he didn’t march. At that time, for an elected official of any kind, let alone one of Irish ancestry, not to march was a big statement. After that we asked elected officials to pledge not to march as long as ILGO was banned. Most affirmatively signed the pledge and said, “I won’t march.” Others didn’t sign, then just didn’t march, and still don’t march. And statewide elected officials often find a way to be off in a far corner of the state on St. Patrick’s Day.

Over the decades, we offered many compromises in response to their stated objections: You don’t want a contingent behind an identifiable LGBT banner? Forget banners! We’d march behind the City Council banner. Sashes are a big thing in the parade—people wear ones with the name of the county they or their families are from. So LGBT people could wear a rainbow sash. Or they could wear a sticker with a shamrock on top of a pink triangle. In 2007 my father, Kim, a contingent of councilmembers and Irish American activists, and I were invited to march as a group in Dublin’s official St. Patrick’s Day Parade wearing those exact stickers. We were trying to come up with
some
identifiable way marching would work in New York. Think of it—it’s okay in Dublin, but not on Fifth Avenue. Sadly, nothing so far has worked. I’m hoping that the next generation of AOH leadership will come to a fair compromise, so we can put this issue behind us. But for now, you won’t find me marching in the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

During my time with Tom, one extremely contentious citywide issue got resolved; it involved an unexpected and very high-profile battle with the city’s newly elected and combative mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. One of the first things Giuliani wanted to do after taking office was to eliminate the Division of AIDS Services. I don’t think the mayor had any idea that his plan to kill DAS would cause such an uproar, and in the beginning I’m not sure he appreciated the significance of DAS or the essential services it provided. Maybe he just saw it as an easy thing to cut from the budget. I don’t think he thought it was going to be a citywide battle.

We found out about Giuliani’s plans from a source inside City Hall, and we passed the information right along to the media. This was on a Thursday, and on the following Monday we had literally thousands of people outside City Hall protesting the plan (and this was before the days of the Internet). The mayor wasn’t the kind of person to back down, so the protest turned into a huge citywide effort to prevent him from eliminating DAS. After an unyielding battle, we prevailed, and the City Council later passed Local Law 49, codifying DAS. This prevented Giuliani from eliminating DAS, and made it so that any future mayor who wants to get rid of it will have to get the City Council to repeal the law.

What I learned from that experience, and from all my time with Tom, was that if you want to get things done—whether it’s finding a way to fix up crappy tenements so people can live with dignity, or getting legislation passed to protect vital city programs—then you’ve got to work hard and be creative. And you have to be willing to work hard in a way that’s relevant to the particular situation. Sometimes that means doing tons of research, sometimes it’s meeting with different people who won’t talk to each other, sometimes it’s participating in activities or organizing events, and sometimes it’s coordinating with other staff or experts or elected officials. Ultimately, the people who succeed in getting the city to be a better place are the ones who are the most focused and work the hardest. It’s a lesson I carry with me every day.

C
HAPTER
8

Facing Myself

I
came to trust Tom in a way I had never trusted anyone in my life. He was so up-front and open about himself in every way, including the fact that he was a recovering alcoholic. And because he spoke about himself so honestly, he gave the impression that he didn’t judge other people. People would tell him things about their lives that they might not consider telling anyone else. I had felt comfortable enough to tell Tom that I was gay, not that it was a realistic option to hide my relationship with Laura. But now as we started a new stage of working together, I felt the need to tell him my darkest secret.

One day a few months after the primary, when I was his chief of staff, we were working alone together, and he started talking about bulimia. Maybe he brought it up because he thought I had a problem. But once he opened the door, I decided to step through it and told him something I’d never mentioned to another soul.

“Oh, I do that,” I said. At that point, I had been making myself sick for ten years, since I was sixteen, when my mother was dying. I would think,
I feel bad. I need not to feel bad.
Then I would overeat to feel better or less sad. I would think,
If I make myself sick, afterward I won’t feel bad for some period of time.
That’s what was going on subconsciously.

But I told myself that I was doing it because I was fat and wanted to lose weight. It was my way to eat and try to lose weight at the same time. When you’re young, you don’t have any sense that you’re trying to get relief from feeling emotionally overwhelmed, or from the fact that your life has become unmanageable (although that’s clearly what I was after). Instead, you tell yourself it’s all about losing weight. No matter how many times I told myself I needed to stop doing it, the brief sense of relief I got afterward would become incentive enough to keep on doing it. The problem was that over time the relief I got became less and less. But by then you really can’t stop—it is such a compulsion. I knew I had a problem because I wanted to stop, but as much as I tried to, I couldn’t. I’d say to myself,
Tomorrow I’m not going to,
or
This week I’m not going to,
and then I’d do it again.