Read With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Online
Authors: Christine Quinn
With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (19 page)
March 10, 2013: the first official day of my campaign for mayor as I kick off a five-borough “Walk and Talk Tour,” meeting voters in the Bronx.
William Alatriste
With my father on my wedding day, May 19, 2012.
William Alatriste
Kim on the arm of her proud father, Anthony Catullo.
William Alatriste
Judge Judith Kaye signs our marriage license while our wedding party looks on.
Seated at table, from left to right:
Wayne Kawadler, Judge Judith Kaye, and me.
Standing, from far left to right along the back wall:
Kelley Wisenger, Kevin Catullo, Robert Catullo, Audra Catullo, James Catullo Jr., James Catullo Sr.
Standing, in the middle row behind Wayne Kawadler:
Diane Catullo, Ellen Quinn, Larry Quinn, Anthony Catullo Sr., Dr. Robert Rohrbaugh, Vincent Catullo, John Wisenger, Kim Catullo, Deborah Wisenger.
Standing behind Kim, but not visible:
Terri Catullo.
William Alatriste
I’ve met my match! Dancing at the wedding reception with my friend and anti-gun violence advocate Jackie Rowe-Adams.
William Alatriste
Just married! I’d never been happier in my life, and I think it shows.
William Alatriste
T
he pace of social change sometimes moves at warp speed, yet sometimes it’s hard to remember what things were like before the change occurred. For many of us, marriage equality is an example of the acceleration of events. It seems so obvious to us now, and public opinion across the country has changed radically. But it doesn’t take a feat of memory to recall the time before everything changed.
There was never a question in my mind that I would take an active role in lobbying state officials to vote in favor of granting same-sex couples the legal right to marry, because first and foremost I believed that passing marriage equality in New York was the right thing to do. Here’s why: if you have part of a law that affirmatively
excludes
a group of people—that says one group of people is less significant than another, and that it’s okay for that group to be left out of the framework of society—then it’s not only bad for that group, it sends the message to the larger society that it’s okay to have second-class citizens. But beyond that, it’s a kind of cancer on the law books, because if a law can affirmatively set aside the rights of one group of people, what’s going to stop discrimination from spreading to other groups that are out of favor with the larger society?
As long as marriage is available, it should be available to everyone and anyone who wants it. It’s very important for the state to make certain that each family knows that it is recognized and supported and taken into consideration in the same way as every other family. The laws of the State of New York have to reach their arms out and wrap themselves around people in order to change a discriminatory policy into a legal affirmation. And for the State of New York to do this would send an affirmative message that it is a jurisdiction that is inclusive of everyone. That would have a ripple effect across the country. And that’s extremely important from both a political and a societal perspective.
At a personal level, I see legal marriage as the way we in society affirm relationships. You could ask, “Shouldn’t relationships be a private thing?” But the truth is that some events are so significant that society has to witness and affirm them in order to really recognize them, whether it’s the swearing-in of the president of the United States or a marriage ceremony. That was something I thought LGBT people deserved and was going to be a powerfully good thing for people and families.
Once the formal effort to pass marriage equality legislation in New York got under way in 2008, I felt compelled to participate for reasons beyond the fact that it was the right thing to do. First, before I was elected Speaker, I believed it was my responsibility, as one of the few openly LGBT members of the City Council, to represent the interests of all LGBT people in New York City. Each LGBT elected official out there feels that responsibility to a different degree; I believed it strongly. And I don’t think it’s any different for any other elected officials: You have your geographic constituency, which is based on the boundaries of the physical area you represent. And then you have a constituency based on who you are, to which you may feel a particular responsibility—to take a leading role on women’s issues or Irish issues or LBGT issues or African American issues or Latino issues or wherever you feel your particular voice can have a positive impact in representing the interests of your constituents.
Also, as the highest-ranking LGBT elected official in the city, it was part of my broader job description to get directly involved in lobbying for the marriage equality bill by meeting with the state senators who held the keys to the bill’s passage. (By this point it was clear that the state assembly and the governor were on board and that only the senate was standing in the way.) And as Speaker, just by showing up I would be sending a far more powerful message to the senators than I could have as an elected official from Greenwich Village: the message that this was important legislation for the City of New York and, not incidentally, important to me personally. And as a gay woman who was partnered and wanted to be legally married, I could use my personal story in a way that I hoped would be persuasive with senators who needed persuading. For a lot of these senators, our meeting would be the first time they’d had to engage a high-ranking gay official, one who contradicted their perception that being LGBT was a negative, at least in terms of running for higher office.
I
n some ways the fight for marriage equality was the end point of a two-decade effort to get domestic partnership recognition and benefits for same-sex couples. Years before marriage equality was even on the radar, when I was still a tenant organizer, I was involved in helping couples with basic issues, like protecting housing rights. New York is a city of renters, and quite often for gay and lesbian couples, only one partner’s name is on the lease. So if that partner dies—and huge numbers of gay men were dying in the 1980s through the mid-1990s—the surviving partner had no succession rights and could be evicted.
When I began my job for ANHD in 1989, a case working its way through the appeals process—
Braschi v. Stahl
—involved a gay man, Miguel Braschi, whose long-term partner had died. He was being evicted from the rent-controlled apartment they’d lived in together for more than a decade. (New York City has different kinds of rent regulations, the strictest being laws that were put in place during World War II to keep rents from spiking during a time when housing was in short supply.) In 1989, New York City’s rent regulations stated that upon the death of a rent-protected tenant, the landlord might not dispossess “either the surviving spouse of the deceased tenant or some other member of the deceased tenant’s family who has been living with the tenant.”
In
Braschi v. Stahl,
the lower court decided against Braschi because it didn’t consider him a spouse or a family member. One of the things I did was organize people to go to court to be there to watch the proceedings. Tom Duane, who was superinvolved in the case, told me about a press conference he organized where a Chelsea neighborhood activist said, “Before the body was cold, the landlord was evicting him!” The appeals court decided in favor of Braschi, which meant that nontraditional partners or domestic partners, whether their names were on the lease or not, had to be recognized for the purposes of succession rights—effectively adding them to the automatic succession rights of “other family members.”
It was a huge win, both because so many people’s homes were no longer at risk and because the decision set a precedent for other cases involving domestic partners. It opened the door to a push for other domestic partner rights, from health benefits to civil unions and eventually to marriage itself. For me personally, that case was significant because it was the first time I could put my finger on why legal recognition of same-sex couples was an imperative, whether or not you were in favor of marriage.