With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (9 page)

G
rief sometimes drags you down, and the situation in Glen Cove was sad; but it also left me with a sense of the limited time we have, and that propelled me forward. So I began my job search for work as a political organizer. It’s hard for me to imagine it, but I didn’t have even one connection in New York City politics or know a single person who had any. I needed a job, so I became an administrative assistant at the Friends of Channel 13, a group of affluent women who raised money for public television. I told myself that at least I had a do-good job that offered a paycheck.

I moved to the city, into an apartment with a friend from high school whose mother would only let her live on the Upper East Side. We lived on East Eighty-ninth between First and York. There was a certain irony to that address. My father had grown up just a few blocks north, at Ninety-sixth and First. He had loved the neighborhood. In his day it was not really such a great place at all, but in his eyes it was absolutely heaven. My grandfather also was enormously fond of Yorkville and its wonderful immigrant community. Even though he drove a bus, he longed to own profitable real estate. But he felt that the real estate potential of Ninety-sixth and First Avenue was lacking. It was a two-fare zone on mass transit, and so he thought it would never become nice. A bus driver sees the city from behind the wheel of the bus. That was his perspective. Every New Yorker has a personal view of this city.

I knew that Channel 13 wasn’t for me in the long run, so I searched for another job when my boss was out of the office. I really wanted to do political organizing around the issues I cared about like housing, education, health care, and the environment. I made telephone calls to people whose names I saw in the papers, and I’d ask them to have coffee or lunch with me. I’d learned to do that when I was organizing in college. If I was organizing an event, I’d read the weekly newspapers and highlight the names of the important people in the town who were mentioned in the stories. I’d make a list of those people and call them.

Cold-calling people produces a lot of anxiety if you let yourself think about it. So I tried not to think about it. You have to treat it like ripping off a Band-Aid or going off a diving board. I learned that if you call people and ask them for help, even people you don’t know, they are often remarkably interested in assisting you. People actually perceive getting a request for help as a big compliment. It means the caller sees something in them. And every successful person has been helped along the way, so many of them are happy to pay back by helping a newcomer.

A funny thing happened with my calls. Early on in my job search, a lot of people would call back because they thought I was Chris
Glen,
who was a high-profile judge at the time. (She was later dean of the CUNY Law School.) Occasionally people would say, “Hi, Your Honor!” and I’d have to tell them I wasn’t Chris Glen, but they generally stayed on the phone anyway and talked to me and advised me. I got all kinds of suggestions and leads that way and eventually found a job as a housing organizer at the Association for Neighborhood Housing and Development (ANHD). I didn’t know it then, but the job would set me on the path to a life of public service. ANHD is a group I still work with today as Speaker.

In my new position, I ran the Housing Justice Campaign. It was a great job, because ANHD is a network of housing groups all across the city. I got to advocate on their behalf—from the end of the Ed Koch administration into the David Dinkins administration, and before the City Council—lobbying for funds in the budget (which is kind of ironic, given the job I have now). For example, Mayor Koch had a ten-year plan to build tens of thousands of affordable housing units across the city. We worked on trying to make that plan even bigger and better. We tried to reverse cuts in the city budget that affected housing, and we worked to eliminate or reform programs that we thought were a waste of money. My work also focused on getting funding for the community-based housing groups we represented.

To do all this, I got to meet with the different groups. I visited all kinds of neighborhoods around the city where I’d never been before. I met amazing people who were developing campaigns and programs on housing issues and fighting for tenants. I got to know people I would never have met, and they were great.

They had awesome stories about their neighborhoods. On the Lower East Side, for example, somebody had heard a rumor that something was going down at City Hall, at the Board of Estimate, at nine o’clock that night. So people ran around the neighborhood to the six different coffee shops and bars and barbershops where their friends hung out, and they all literally ran to City Hall. Whatever it was that had been slipped on the government’s agenda for that meeting, they stopped. For me, the idea that people would know exactly who was at which bar and which diner was thrilling. It was beyond exciting that a neighborhood’s sense of itself was so complete that people knew where everybody else was and how to find them.

I went to the South Bronx and to Williamsburg and to Hell’s Kitchen. Everywhere I went, I met a different group. It was fascinating—from Banana Kelly in the South Bronx to St. Nick’s in Greenpoint, everybody was doing ostensibly the same thing, but with its own flavor, depending on the makeup of the neighborhood and its needs. At St. Nick’s in Greenpoint the neighborhood was then very, very Polish, so they had to have Polish-speaking staff. Banana Kelly, in the late 1980s, was still trying to figure out how to work with the city-owned property that existed but needed to be rebuilt from top to bottom. That was different from Williamsburg, which was more built; the group there was dealing with landlord issues. I found out that you can’t stick with one model of anything in this city—the problems, the needs, and the solutions change from neighborhood to neighborhood.

These places were and are remarkable. Every neighborhood has its own people, its own special places, and its own identity. Today it’s getting harder and harder for neighborhoods, but they still exist, and there are always new pockets of people, and new diners or coffee shops or other places where community is built. These little pockets of people are full of personality and identity and energy. The conversations, the gossip, the moving from place to place, and the stories make Facebook and other social media look like virtual copies of the real thing. It was fun, and the people were funny. I liked to sit and listen to their stories. I still do.

As I explored the city’s different neighborhoods and met with the various community housing groups and community leaders, I found a city that was so much more diverse than I’d ever imagined. And the issues concerning housing were much more complicated than I’d expected. But I was also impressed by how many people were trying to fix the problems. It was exhilarating to have the opportunity to work with community groups and elected officials citywide on an important issue that carried the possibility of helping to improve people’s lives.

I learned a lot, too, about how the City Council works, how the budget process works, and how city government in general works. In my interactions with public officials, I discovered that based on the years of dealing with my mother, I could read the body language of people and then I could figure things out on my feet. I could think while I was in motion. Maybe I inherited that ability from my grandmother Nellie Callaghan, who knew you could pray while running.

T
his job had other life-changing impacts. For one, I met Tom Duane at an ANHD-related event concerning tenants. Neither of us can remember which event it was, so in recent years whenever Tom and I are at a tenant or housing rally, we’ll joke and say, “
This
is the issue we met over!” Tom was working for the City Comptroller’s office, but he was mostly biding his time to try a second run for City Council. He lost in 1989, but with an upcoming expansion of the City Council from thirty-five to fifty-one members, Tom stood a good chance of winning in a district—the West Village, Chelsea, and Hell’s Kitchen—that was likely to elect an openly gay candidate.

I liked Tom from the first. He was funny and outgoing and interesting. He had this teddy-bear quality that made him very appealing. And he was a big deal. In his first run for City Council, he almost took out a longtime incumbent. This meeting eventually led to my joining Tom’s campaign in the winter of 1990 as a volunteer working evenings and weekends. I was involved in a lot of planning and strategy and fund-raising meetings. I also met Tom’s team of advisers and volunteers.

The following May I took a leave of absence from ANHD to become part of his paid staff, as the campaign manager. For the next four months, it was 24/7. I had to raise money, figure out the strategy, develop the direct mail pieces, recruit and manage the volunteers, get the phone script ready so the volunteers could call potential voters, identify potential voters, find a press person, create a press plan, read the mail, and respond to whatever the crisis of the day was.

As in any political campaign, I had to keep a zillion balls in the air at once, and whatever I thought was going to happen on one day was almost never what did happen that day. The most important things were to keep things moving and to manage the candidate so that he could execute the campaign plan. We had a paid staff of four and a lot of volunteers. It was hard work and a lot of it. And if I had not been struggling with feelings that I couldn’t keep at bay any longer, it would have been the best year of my life.

A
s soon as I officially joined Tom’s campaign staff, he introduced me to everyone as his “straight campaign manager.” He was so excited that he had a straight manager, as only Tom could be. I think he got a kick out of it because no one would have expected him to have one. The problem was, I wasn’t straight, and it was getting more and more difficult for me to keep up the pretense—even to myself—that I was straight.

I was in denial about my sexuality. Let’s face it. I had enough on my plate, I thought. As a teenager I had decided that I would never have a personal life, and that was a great way to put my real feelings into a box and bury them. But as I was finding myself in my work, which I loved, I could no longer hide from who I was.

Enter Laura, who had been Tom’s campaign volunteer coordinator on his first campaign. She came back to volunteer in 1991 and was part of his strong kitchen cabinet, so she was around all the time. She was an out lesbian. She was very involved in ACT UP and Queer Nation. Being LGBT wasn’t the problem for Laura that it still was for me. It soon became clear that she was interested in me. She was sweet with me. She would hang around and be attentive, while I was uncomfortable and awkward.

Quite frankly, I was clueless about flirting and dating. I would have been just as flummoxed if it had been a guy flirting with me. No one—male or female—had ever expressed that kind of interest in me before, so I was totally inexperienced. Funny—my inexperience didn’t keep me from flirting back. It seemed to come naturally, and somehow I forgot that I had promised never to let this kind of thing happen.

When I realized where things were headed, I decided I had to call a halt to it. One night when Laura and I were working late at the campaign office, I said, “Look, I’m flattered that you’ve been flirting with me and I know I’ve been flirting back, but I shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry that I did and I’m going to stop it because this can’t happen. I’m not going to be gay.” It didn’t occur to me that Laura would be upset on both a personal and political level. Personally, because I was telling her that despite my flirting nothing was going to happen; and politically, because to say I wasn’t going to be gay when I was gay was unacceptable to her as an activist. I was still in a frame of mind where I just wasn’t going to let this happen. Being LGBT was not going to work for me. Life was challenging enough, so why take on something that would make it even tougher? I didn’t need another challenge.

It makes me cringe to think of this exchange and of what I said. But I felt the same kind of self-loathing that so many men and women feel. I’m just lucky that Laura had the smarts and patience to stick with me. The next morning I called her to see if she was okay. She said, “How do you think I am? I’m terrible!” She came to the campaign office that evening, and when we finished up, I had to take some packages to the post office, so we went together and talked afterward. I explained what I’d been thinking the night before but hadn’t been able to articulate, about how I didn’t want this to happen and why. She listened and was very understanding. I guess that’s what I needed. Things went from me saying that it wasn’t going to happen to
it
happening. Laura and I lived together for the next seven years.

S
o now I had another river to cross. I was no longer the straight campaign manager for the first openly gay candidate for City Council. I had to tell Tom that Laura and I were seeing each other. It strikes me as idiotic that I was worried about coming out to my boss, an extremely up-front LGBT leader in New York City. But I was scared. I had never done this before.

So I chose my moment carefully—or maybe not. We were on the subway heading downtown to a Rent Guidelines Board hearing, where Tom was scheduled to testify. While sitting on the train at the City Hall subway station, I said, “Tom, I have something serious to tell you.”

He panicked. “Oh my God, you’re going to quit!”

I shook my head.

“Oh my God, you’re a lesbian!”

I nodded and told him I was seeing Laura. Then we discussed his testimony for the hearing. Later, as we were walking into the auditorium where the hearing was taking place, I said, “Tom, we really need to talk about this.” And he said, “Yeah, we’ll find time,” which we did at breakfast the next morning after we’d been out distributing leaflets.

Tom told me he was happy for me and would be there for me if I ever wanted to talk. He made it clear that it was no big deal. And then it was back to the campaign, because there was just too much to do and nothing much more to say. My big drama didn’t disturb the people in the office—they wanted me to be happy. I appreciated their support and warmth, especially as I began to consider how to break the news to my father. I fretted over it for months. Finally, I knew I had to get it over with, so I called him and told him I wanted to come see him after work.