With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (12 page)

It was disappointing and frustrating, so it was something of a relief to confide in someone I trusted. Tom was kind and supportive, but he was also concerned. He didn’t press me, but in the weeks and months that followed, he encouraged me to seek treatment. He explained that like all addictive diseases, bulimia is progressive. He recommended that I go to an inpatient eating disorder clinic and suggested a place where someone he knew had gone.

If it had come from anybody else, I would have rejected the idea, but Tom was the right messenger. I didn’t welcome the idea of checking into a clinic, but he helped me recognize that the only way I could get better was to get help, and that the best way to get help was in a clinical setting.

Tom told everyone at work that I was taking a leave of absence. My girlfriend, Laura, of course knew I was going, and I told a couple of friends. But that was it. Once I was there, I called my sister to tell her where I was and why, and her response was very positive. I never told my father.

I remember getting off the plane and looking for the person with the sign for the clinic. A couple of other people were getting picked up at the same time, and once we got to the place, we were each taken into a different room to fill out lots of paperwork and answer lots of questions. Then I got my room assignment. We had the rest of the day to settle in, and things didn’t really start until the next morning.

My first morning didn’t get off to a great start. Because it’s a medical facility and they keep track of your health while you’re in treatment, they draw blood on a regular basis. The first time I just about fainted. Not full-out fainting, but on the way to fainting, which is something that rarely happens to me. I must have been very anxious, and the needle in my arm just pushed me over the edge.

Every day in rehab was pretty structured. You got up, you had breakfast, and you had individual therapy, where you had to talk about yourself, or maybe group therapy, where you had to talk about yourself and listen to other people talking about themselves. There might be exercise walks, and there might be journaling. Those of us with eating disorders sat together and ate together, sometimes under the supervision of a staff member. This structure made it possible for us to understand our issues better and break bad patterns. It was a good start.

We also got an education on nutrition. Having grown up in a home where our meals were determined by the route home from the day’s lessons, I found the new information confusing but critical—and it has been useful ever since. That said, learning about the difference between a carbohydrate and a protein was a breeze compared with the therapy sessions. You had to talk about your life in at least one one-on-one therapy session and in one group session a day. The whole process was incredibly challenging because for the first time I was forced to face elements of myself that I had ignored.

People came to rehab with all sorts of issues and goals. One enormously overweight woman just wanted to be able to walk on the beach with her grandchildren and to bend down and pick up shells. A very overweight man in his thirties had the kinds of health problems you might expect in someone decades older. An anorexic mom talked a lot about her children, and how she felt bad about what she was putting them through. What struck me about these people was the fact that they just wanted to be able to do the simplest things, walking with a grandchild on the beach or being normal about food at home. Our shared challenges were making our lives complicated and unmanageable. We all yearned for a time when these issues would fade, where something or someone greater than ourselves could help us help ourselves, so we could get on with our lives in the fullest ways possible.

Everyone talked about trying this and that and the other thing to stop doing whatever it was that had landed them in rehab. Even if their experiences were different from mine, I could identify with the feelings they were going through. It helped that everybody was there for the same basic mission, so the kinship and camaraderie made opening up a little easier.

I talked a lot about my childhood and my mother and those feelings of responsibility, guilt, and blame. I believed—and I guess I’ll always believe it on some level—that it was my fault she got sick, that it’s my fault she died, that if I had been a better child, if I had been an easier child, she wouldn’t have gotten sick, or the sickness would not have progressed and she would not have died.

I think when you’re a kid, you need to assign blame to something or someone, because otherwise you’re just living in a universe that’s spinning out of control. Now, all that is intellectually absurd, and even at sixteen you know that that’s not how cancer works. I wasn’t a bad kid, but knowing something rationally and intellectually is different from understanding the implications and impact of those feelings on your life, and when something starts in childhood in a dark and bad time, it can be hard, if not impossible, to break that cycle without help. I came to realize that even though I was in my midtwenties, I was dealing with issues of my childhood.

It was one of my first significant or big moments of asking for help. It was a shock for me to let go of the idea that “I can do it all, I can fix it—it’s all on me.” This perspective had become part of me growing up, when I was taking care of people. So that message was significant for me to hear and take in.

Another important thing happened: I realized that it’s okay to not feel good about yourself. It’s not the end of the world, but you have to find ways to cope with that feeling and to let go of it so you don’t internalize it. Because if you’re bulimic or drinking too much, you’re making yourself feel worse. This may seem completely obvious, but sometimes it’s hard to see.

Probably a third thing was the recognition that when things happen in life, they have an impact. It’s no use pretending they don’t, because they do. They don’t go away so you have to deal with them. I had to learn that confronting them is not an admission of weakness or failure, which is how I’d thought about it before. I wasn’t dealing with it properly. I started to piece it together during that month. Rehab planted seeds in me that then grew later on.

When I went to rehab, it had a food wing and an alcohol and drug wing. We did some things together and some things separately. The clinic basically said that if you’re in either wing, food or drink, you have an addictive personality, so if you drink, you really should think about stopping. In the time after rehab, I started thinking about how I drank, and that I often drank for the sake of getting drunk. I had thought it was normal, but I came to realize it wasn’t. As the years went by, I started drinking much less, cutting back, watching what I drank, never drinking to get drunk. And then about three years ago, I decided, look, if you’re spending time managing it and thinking so much about controlling it, it’s not a good or healthy thing. So I asked for help, and I got it. Over the last three years I haven’t drank at all. And the truth is, my realizations at the rehab clinic over two decades ago started a process that has now fully come to fruition.

You would think that given my family history I should have been more aware of my potential for having a drinking problem. My father’s grandfather was a terrible drunk, and consequently my father’s father, Pa Quinn, didn’t drink, and he drilled into my father that drinking was a bad thing. This was a story my father told repeatedly throughout my childhood. So my father didn’t drink, and he was very up-front about it being a practical thing; he had no philosophical or religious reasoning for not drinking or for why he thought it was a bad thing.

My father’s mother, Nana Quinn, drank too much, too, and so did my mother’s father and one of his brothers, who were always being shipped off to the drunk tank to sober up. My mother drank too much as well, although it was hard to tell if she was on alcohol or the calming-down pills the doctors gave her. But none of that penetrated, and once I started going out to clubs and dances, I’d always drink until I was drunk.

I
did not have any expectations of finding a cure or discovering happiness by going to rehab. I was just looking for freedom from misery. If I could simply feel neutral, that would be achieving a state of bliss. I didn’t have to be happy, just not feel horrible. It was a modest goal, and by the time I went back to work, I didn’t feel horrible, although it would be a long and difficult road before I felt good, even happy.

But the amazing news is that today I actually know happiness, and know that even in life’s dark moments I can get help. It’s okay to ask for it. Those miracles that my mother and Aunt Julia believed in—if you pray, if you work on yourself, if you know when to pray and when to run—those miracles can and do come true.

C
HAPTER
9

City Council

I
stayed with Tom as his chief of staff for nearly six years. It got to the point where I could have done the job with my eyes closed, and I needed a change. Leaving it wasn’t easy, especially because with Tom I had no secrets, but it was time. The job was getting too easy. And when things get too easy, you don’t do them as well. That’s not fair to anybody.

Tom was supportive and encouraged me to reach for something that would be more challenging. “You need to make your mark in the world, separate and apart from me,” he said. And he was right. I needed to do something new. But where was I to go? It would have been great to move up at City Hall, but with Giuliani in office, I could forget about a job on the mayor’s staff (and I wouldn’t have wanted one given our dramatically divergent political views), so I looked outside city government.

I eventually landed a job as executive director of the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. I’d worked with AVP when I was on Tom’s staff and had a lot of respect for them. They were a good mix of providing direct service and counseling crime victims, and also doing advocacy—trying to change and improve things in the police department. I liked the variety, and I liked the fact that the group’s activities were informed by the real-life experiences of their clients. The closer the work is to the clients, the more you understand their problems and the challenges everybody faces.

Hate crimes were even more rampant then, and AVP played an important role in bringing attention to the problem. During this period our community endured a series of attacks, including murders. These can be challenging crimes to deal with, because if an LGBT person is murdered and wasn’t out, how does the family go to the police about a hate crime? Very often the family would say to AVP, “Don’t say anything” about the fact that the person was gay. But the family really wasn’t our client. Still, despite the stigma, mothers and/or fathers would come to us in search of justice or eventually join in the effort.

When I took over at AVP, my goal was to expand the great work they had done and to enlist the community to put even more pressure on the police department, the district attorney’s offices, and Mayor Giuliani to make the city safer for LGBT people. By now I understood the workings of city government and knew how to get it to pay attention and even follow through. I knew we could fix this by building bridges between our communities and the people in power. For example, back then the police weren’t as well-trained or sensitive about same-sex domestic violence and sexual assault as they are now, and consequently the police weren’t always as responsive as they needed to be, but that’s gotten so much better because of everyone’s work.

A
nother one of my objectives as AVP’s executive director was to build on the organization’s already good relationship with the police, and to help them do a better job recognizing and acknowledging hate crimes. Sometimes it was easy, and sometimes it wasn’t. For example, one time it seemed obvious that we were dealing with a hate crime, but at first the police refused to classify it as one.

A couple of guys were walking home in West Chelsea, crossing Twenty-third Street and heading north to Twenty-fifth Street. A turning car got too close to them, and the guys yelled something at the people in the car. Then the guys in the car yelled something anti-LGBT at them. They got out of the car and chased the guys down Twenty-third Street, up Tenth Avenue, and across Twenty-fifth Street. They caught one of the men and beat him over the head. He lost an eye. The police department chose not to categorize this as a hate crime, because it began as a traffic altercation. Of course that was ridiculous. There are lots of traffic incidents, and 99.99 percent of them don’t end up with people getting chased and beaten up, much less losing an eye.

In response to the police department’s failure to categorize this incident as a hate crime, we organized demonstrations and did press conferences, calling on the police to reverse that decision. We held a demonstration in front of the local police precinct. On a local television news show, I debated the commanding officer of the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force over what constituted a hate crime. Eventually everyone’s work made a big difference, and the NYPD changed its mind. This matters because if government and society don’t name a crime accurately, it is as if it never happened.

Same-sex domestic violence is another key area of work and service for AVP. Recently a woman came up to me at an event and said, “I know you from AVP. You moved me out of my apartment, and saved me.” I immediately remembered her. She had come to AVP because she was a victim of domestic violence. Her girlfriend hadn’t been home, so we went there and packed all the woman’s possessions in shopping bags and garbage bags and moved her out. Then the girlfriend cross-complained, resulting in both of them getting arrested. I went and waited for the woman at the station house until she was released. The next week she came to the office for counseling. We saw a car parked out front, and the ex-girlfriend was in it. Since she had orders of protection, we called the Sixth Precinct, and they came and arrested the ex-girlfriend. Seeing this woman, who is now married and has a child, made me so proud of my work and the work of all the staff of AVP. It reminded me of how critical the interactions between government and citizenry are, especially when people need help and support.