With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (10 page)

We saw each other a lot, but a visit out of nowhere must have seemed a little unusual. After Aunt Julia died, he got out of Glen Cove quickly. He’d sold our house and moved to a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But he brought way too much furniture with him—almost everything from the living room and family room—and jammed it all into his apartment. So there were lots of places to sit, but there wasn’t a lot of room to move around. He brought fourteen chairs, which I know because I counted them as they came off the moving van.

I was in a hurry to get this over with, so as soon as I arrived, we sat down in the living room across from each other. He was on the blue sofa, and I was in one of the club chairs. I was feeling anxious and fearful, because as much as I hoped it would go well, I knew it could go terribly wrong. I had heard all kinds of stories about people coming out, ranging from Hallmark moments, which this most likely wasn’t going to be, to horrible situations where the family never spoke to the person again, which I didn’t expect either.

I
t helped that my sister already knew. Unfortunately, she had found out in a way that was awkward and hurtful, and I still feel bad about it. She had been trying for weeks to reach me at my apartment in Brooklyn, but I was spending most of my time at Laura’s apartment. After calling a bunch of times and not getting a callback from me, she finally badgered my old roommate into giving her Laura’s phone number. Laura was one of the people who ran the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats, so her answering machine said: “You can leave a message here for Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats or Laura.”

It wasn’t much of a leap for Ellen to figure things out, and when she did, she was angry. Not at the truth, mind you, but at me, for not telling her myself. She was totally right—I should have. But I was afraid, and it’s not like I had much of a family by this time. My mother and aunt and grandparents were gone, so it was just me, my sister, and my father.

I hadn’t lost Ellen at all, but now here I was risking my relationship with my father, at a time when I was still on shaky ground. I hoped I was doing the right thing. There’s that moment before you take a leap into the unknown, which I was about to do with my father, when you have to remind yourself to breathe so you can take the next step. I took a deep breath.

“I have something to tell you,” I said. “I wanted to let you know that I’m in a relationship with Laura, and I’m gay.”

Without hesitating and with an edge in his voice, my father said, “Never say that again.”

His words were disappointing, but not surprising, and they stung. I struggled not to get angry in response. Instead I said, “Well, okay, but I’m going to say it again to whomever I want to say it to. I’ve lived up to my responsibility by telling you, so what you do with the information is up to you.”

He said, “Let’s go get dinner.”

We walked over to the Popover Café. We weren’t there very long, but with nothing to talk about other than what we’d read in the newspaper that day, it felt like an eternity. It was incredibly awkward. Clearly he wanted to get out of there and go home. And honestly, so did I. It was a relief to have told him the truth about my life, and I took comfort in knowing I’d done the right thing, but I was hurt. And now I was in the land of uncertainty because I had no way of knowing how things with my father would be. I hoped eventually he’d come around.

And he has, in remarkable, almost unimaginable ways. Not exactly in words, but in presence and deeds.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what happened in my father’s apartment that night and why he reacted as he did. I’m pretty sure he knew I was gay by then, but he lived in a world where people didn’t feel the need to talk about things, even if they were obvious. It was awkward enough for him that the thing I was telling him about was outside his realm of experience, but the fact that I felt the need to tell him in the first place was well beyond his realm.

My father is an honest and loving man, blessed with a wry sense of humor. But my confession put him on the spot and rendered him speechless. It didn’t feel good when it happened, and it hasn’t always been easy since then. Sometimes he would distance himself, and sometimes I’d do the same. Then I’d ask Ellen to intervene. Daddy is a little afraid of Ellen—and so am I. We both pretty much do what she says.

My father and I have a unique and significant way of communicating, and in reality we are extremely close, although ours is different from many father-daughter relationships. We both know how much love there is between us, and even if we don’t express it in words, we show it in actions. It helps to remember—and I have to remind myself—that my father exists on two planes that are contradictory, which I think a lot of parents of gay children face, especially those whose religious tenets conflict with their love for their child.

But the most important thing about my father is that he reached beyond a lifetime of traditional beliefs in order to support and embrace me, my friends—who have become
his
friends—my work, and the woman I love. He is there whenever he is needed—he’s introduced me at every State of the City address I’ve given since I was elected Speaker in 2006. He marches every year in New York City’s LGBT pride parade. And he walked me down the aisle at my wedding.

My dad has spent a ton of time stuffing envelopes for LGBT efforts and going to LGBT events. He still makes jokes. He calls the Gay and Lesbian Independent Democrats the “Gaelic League of Independent Democrats.” And he told my sister that doing mailings for all these different LGBT groups was the twentieth-century version of a gay quilting bee—you all sit around a table, stuff envelopes, and talk.

It took time for my father to reach this point. I can’t say I know what the journey has been like for him. As I’ve said, we’re not a family that talks about such things. But for me the most significant lesson is that people have an enormous ability to evolve and accept. You can’t demand that everyone evolve and accept in the ways you want them to, but things work out. And the love that exists between my father and me is palpable. Though it is silent in words, it is loud in deeds.

C
HAPTER
7

Duane’s World

W
hen I first went to work for Tom Duane’s 1991 campaign, we didn’t know who his opponent in the primary would be. It was a newly redrawn district that was heavily LGBT. The incumbent decided not to run again, and then Liz Abzug, whose mother was the legendary feminist liberal congresswoman Bella Abzug, decided to run. Liz was also LGBT.

Tom had very deep roots as a neighborhood and LGBT activist. As my father used to say, “The man joined everything!” He had been a district leader and a community board member, and he had written a zoning plan for the neighborhood, for starters. It was almost impossible to identify a local issue that Tom hadn’t been involved in, at least tangentially. He was committed to the people in his district on all levels, and he felt a personal urgency around LGBT issues and HIV and AIDS.

Tom was HIV positive. He told me this in a completely roundabout way one night, and we often still joke about it.

He called me late one evening at work when I was the only person in the office, and he said, “They formed this new HIV-positive Democratic club, and they’re going to have their first meeting.”

“Great, you should go,” I said.

“Well, it’s only for people who are HIV positive,” he said. “It’s not for allies.”

“Well, I think you can probably still go as a candidate,” I said.

And he said, “Well, I
am
HIV positive, so if I go more people will know.”

Only a bit surprised, I shook my head.
How are we going to deal with this?
I wondered. But Tom knew—he already had a plan.

Tom had to be honest about his HIV status, and he was determined to be, so there was never any question that he would go public. But we had no idea how people would react. And we could not anticipate the potential fallout. Today it would not be as major an issue, but you have to put yourself back into history. This was 1991. AIDS was still a complete epidemic.

There was real prejudice against people who were infected with HIV and tremendous fear about the disease. As far as we could tell, Tom would be the first openly HIV-positive person to run for public office anywhere in the world. We lacked precedents for what was happening, but luckily a volunteer on the campaign was a public relations director for a large nonprofit, and he helped us develop a plan and manage the media storm.

We settled on sending out, at the beginning of the campaign, a very simple personal letter from Tom to all his constituents, in which he discussed his HIV status. We leaked a copy of the letter to the
New York Times
and timed the mailing so that the letter would get to people the same day the
Times
story broke. So that morning there was a cover story in the
Times
’s Metro section about Tom’s HIV status. (Back then there was still a separate Metro section with local news.)

We had arranged for Tom to be out leafleting at a subway entrance on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-third Street that morning. The response was beyond anything anyone could have imagined. Dozens of reporters and photographers and television cameras showed up at a press conference later that day, and Tom calmly took everyone’s questions. The night before the
Times
story, the phone rang off the hook, and the PR guy who was helping us said, “Just don’t answer it.” Those were the days of answering machines, and we could hear all the messages people were leaving. One of the calls was from the
New York Post,
which had gotten wind of the letter we had leaked to the
Times
. I’ll never forget this one message, in a voice that was classic New Yawkese: “Will somebody pleeeeease cawwwwwwl the
Neeeeeew Yaaaaawk Post
!”

Tom’s campaign team was a typical Duane mix: old-time neighborhood campaign people, LGBT folks, people who had been engaged in politics for a couple of races, and gay folks who were newer to the political scene. AIDS and LGBT activists seized the opportunity to help elect the first openly gay and openly HIV-positive candidate for City Council.

And you have to add my father to the mix, because when I went to work for Tom—as in everything else I have done—he came along with me. My father likes to joke that he virtually financed Tom’s campaign. That’s an exaggeration, but he was certainly generous and involved. If you ask him, he’ll tell you that he bought eight dollars’ worth of bagels for the campaign staffers and volunteers every day, which they really appreciated. He drove volunteers to places where they set up tables for campaigning. People loved him. He’s funny and colorful and entertaining. And he enjoyed it, too, and I loved having him around.

My dad is a terrific storyteller. And he sure has stories, from both past and present. His Irish roots and working-class history make for quite an epic. And his years as shop steward at Sperry are the source of a tale or two. Telling stories, and telling them well, is an art. And my father is a master. He is also a very good active listener. So the people I worked with then, and the people I work with now, came to admire him and enjoy spending time with him. He’s quirky and funny, and he’s always there in a great way.

T
he thing I quickly discovered about running a campaign was that you have absolutely no time to manage things in an orderly way—it’s so fast moving. You don’t have the luxury of sitting down with someone to talk. I learned to be grateful and appreciative when I could tell people what they were doing well, because undoubtedly I’d have to point out what they were doing wrong, too. A campaign is not always a matter of management, but it is always a matter of momentum.

Tom and I complemented each other’s strengths and weaknesses most of the time. We are both stubborn and have tempers, and during the campaign—and later when I was his chief of staff—we’d sometimes get into it. When I feel like I’m not being listened to, like I’m being disregarded, it gets to me. I try to control my temper, but sometimes I can’t help it, and with Tom things could get pretty heated. Whenever that happened, after the storm passed Tom would reassure the staff that everything was okay by saying something like “Mommies and daddies often fight, but it doesn’t mean they don’t love each other.” We were an unusual set of parents—and we loved each other.

I
n New York City, the primary happens in September and the election follows in November. We knew Tom would have no significant challenger in November, so the primary was the real election for us. Primary day was a huge managerial operation. You sent people out to leaflet at the subways and the polling places, to put up posters, to knock on doors, and to make sure the phone banks were running, that kind of stuff. You’d break up the district into sectors, and the sector coordinators would drive around in cars checking in on the different polling places to make sure the people you had assigned to be at the polls had enough leaflets and other supplies. The people assigned to the polls had to call in to campaign headquarters in the morning, at midday, and at five p.m. to give us the number of people who had voted. We’d get calls about this or that machine not working, and we had to deal with any other problems that came up.

I stayed in our storefront office on Eighth Avenue all day coordinating things. By evening, it was pretty clear Tom was going to win. Everybody was gathering at the restaurant next door: volunteers, supporters, press, and elected officials. It was packed. At some point Tom arrived and was surrounded by a sea of people. I watched from the back of the room.

On election night you’re on adrenaline, so you’re thrilled and exhausted and exhilarated all at the same time. It was an incredible high, especially because I knew how much Tom’s win meant to so many people whose voices hadn’t been heard in city government before. His election was a turning point. This was the third or fourth time a gay person had run for that particular City Council seat, but it was the first time a gay person had won. After all this effort and all this time, it felt like a ceiling had cracked. The community had battled the government for recognition and for the gay rights bill, and were still fighting for better funding for HIV and AIDS. They had waged so many battles, and they would fight many more, but this was a great victory. We had no illusions that the trials were over, but now at least we’d have somebody on the inside helping the fight. And as Tom’s new chief of staff, I’d have a chance to help with all these efforts.