The Mighty Quinn

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn stands atop Terrace On The Park, looking over the most diverse county in the nation.

Gay Speaker Discusses LGBT Politics

By Brian M. Rafferty

Christine Quinn has been fighting for gay rights since she arrived in New York City 18 years ago. She has protested, has been arrested, has fought behind the scenes, has fought for the district that elected her to the City Council and now leads that Council as Speaker – the highest rank in city politics ever achieved by a gay person.

And she is not prepared to stop there. She has her sights set on makings sure that leaders in Albany and in Washington hear the call that she is proud to lead on behalf of the gay population of New York City and beyond.

Recently profiled as the most politically powerful member of the LGBT community in the country, Quinn took a few minutes last week to reflect on her role as a legislator, as a gay activist and on the future of LGBT politics in New York City.

Making Progress

“It’s been fun,” she said of being in what many consider to be the right place at the right time, in terms of political winds. “I’ve been very lucky. In my entire time working in politics, my orientation and gender have never been a problem or held me back. When I ran for Speaker it just wasn’t an issue.”

Quinn chalks that up to years of progress with the mainstream’s acceptance of the gay community.

“We, as a community, because of the hard work of our community, have made tremendous progress,” she said. “That was not always the case. The reality of it is that for many years there has been a very active and aware gay community in New York that tries to improve the lives of the LGBT community. The by-product has been changing the hearts and minds of New Yorkers.

She said the most important contributions of the community has been the efforts that have led to the implementation of legislative changes, small victories that have added up to affect a change in the political climate of the five boroughs.

Gay Roots Planted

Twenty years before Quinn moved to New York from Long Island, where she grew up, gay activism in the city was born at the Stonewall Inn. Police, who had routinely rousted transgender and effeminate people in bars, entered Stonewall and the club’s patrons began to fight back. Over the course of the next few hours, police became holed up in the bar with at least 2,000 members of the gay community rioting in response to reports of beatings by police outside the bar. People tried to set the bar on fire, used parking meters to beat the police – all the while chanting “Gay Power.”

The riots continued for a few more nights, but the paradigm had already shifted – the gay community was no longer going to accept second-class citizens status. The time for advocacy had begun.

In 1989 Quinn came to New York and immediately got involved with ACT-UP, a civil disobedience organization that protests for AIDS research and spending. Less than a year later the focus of homophobia and advocacy shifted from the streets of Greenwich Village to a schoolyard in Jackson Heights. Julio Rivera, a bartender originally from the Bronx, was lured to the yard of PS 69 by three men who beat him to death because he was gay.

“The birth of the Queens movement was death of Julio Rivera,” Quinn said. “Out of that came an active and well-organized Queens community. The sad truth is we still see violence against the LGBT community in our city.”

A Political Force

The community in the 1980s and 1990s made tremendous progress,” Quinn added. “We went from a city where people had to fight tooth and nail to get police to recognize an attack as a hate crime to where now they know it is a hate crime. Now we see far more places where LGBT people can feel safe in the street.”

The Gay & Lesbian Independent Democrats, a political club founded in the West Village in 1974 that has placed many members into both city and state positions – including Quinn herself – put pressure on city officials to take public stands on issues dear to the LGBT community, which was offsetting to many politicians at the time.

“Now you say you are for gay marriage on the cover of The New York Times,” Quinn said.

“Queens has been one of the leaders in the evolution of the political landscape,” Quinn added. “It is one of the first places where the community became organized and visible. When you are visible you become part of the community in a real way. The LGBT community is as much a part of the fabric as Jackson Heights as the rest of the residents.”

Some Hurdles Remain

As for the future, Quinn sees a light at the end of the tunnel, but it is too difficult to pinpoint just how close that end is.

“We need to keep doing what we’ve been doing – to be a very active community in the city, to make sure we are standing shoulder to shoulder when other groups are fighting a Civil Rights battle,” Quinn said. “If one community is held back, everybody is held back.”

She called the current debate over gay marriage one of the most important issues facing the community today. “Gay marriage is a Civil Rights issue,” she said. “It is not frivolous or symbolic.”

As far as the rest of the agenda of the gay community, they merely echo the needs of the rest of the population, Quinn said. “There are very few solely gay issues out there – every issue is a gay issue. Schools, access to health care, preserving and affording housing – these are our issues.”

Of course not all politicians are on the same page about the same issues. “You can’t generalize about gay politics beyond saying the gay community cares about gay marriage,” Quinn said. “There are some who are very progressive, some who are more moderate. But clearly, all issues that are of concern to the LGBT are a concern to New Yorkers.

Paraphrasing former Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, Quinn noted that the difference between the gay community and the rest of the city is barely perceptible. “There is no gay or straight way to pick up the garbage,” she said, adding “we just might have better uniforms.”

“But seriously, I think we are coming close. We are on the dawn of being to the place where being LGBT is not going to be in any way shape or form negative,” she said. “There is not a doubt in my mind that we are headed in the right direction.”