New York City Council District 3 celebrates 30 years of LGBTQ representation
The four out gay council members who have occupied the seat during the past three decades say they’re focused on the work that lies ahead.
Tom Duane was the first out gay representative of District 3. William Alatriste
In 1991, a year after Deborah Glick became the first out gay state legislator in New York, gay New York City Council candidate Tom Duane stood on the precipice of a potentially risky move. He was running in the Democratic primary against Liz Abzug – who was also out gay – in a newly created council district that included the West Village, Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.
Duane had a good chance of becoming one of the first out gay members of the council. The new district was one of several drawn with an eye toward giving underrepresented minority groups a voice in the council, with one of those groups being LGBTQ New Yorkers. The neighborhoods in the new district have been central to the gay rights movement in New York – both before and after the Stonewall riots. The district was considered “gay winnable,” Duane said.
But he also faced what he referred to as a personal “calling” to disclose that he was HIV-positive, even though some warned against it in light of the ignorance and discrimination toward gay people during the AIDS epidemic. “There were a lot of people who thought that it was a terrible idea to tell anybody,” Duane recalled to City & State recently. “But I was determined. I was going to do it no matter what, and however people were going to react, they were going to react.”
Inspired to disclose his status in a letter to constituents by Brian Coyle, a Minneapolis City Council member who disclosed his own HIV status in a similar way, Duane went on to win the council seat. Along with Antonio Pagán, another openly gay politician, Duane was one of the first two out gay members of the council.
This year marks three straight decades of representation by a gay or lesbian member in City Council District 3. Thirty years after Duane first joined the council, the seat has now been held by two openly HIV-positive members – Duane and Corey Johnson – and has given the council two of its most recent speakers – Christine Quinn and Johnson. Its current occupant, Erik Bottcher, came up as a council staffer, most recently working in Johnson’s office before being elected last year.
Duane’s reminiscence of his 1991 campaign and his seven years in the council – some of which were spent joining advocates in fighting then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani to maintain social services for people with HIV, particularly low-income people – served as a reminder of how much has changed for the better. “At the height of the AIDS epidemic, before protease inhibitors or any other antiretroviral drugs existed, he came out as an HIV-positive gay man,” Johnson said of Duane, adding that Duane was one of the first people to whom he disclosed his own HIV status years later. “I don’t think it would have been not just … possible for me to run, but probably wouldn’t have been possible for me to be alive if it weren’t for people like Tom Duane and (gay rights activist) Allen Roskoff, and so many other people who really blazed the trail for people like me.”
“His office was used more or less like a gay community center,” Roskoff, president of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club and a longtime resident of the district, said of Duane’s office.
Owles, the late gay rights activist and Roskoff’s former partner, ran unsucessfully to represent the area in the council in 1973. David Rothenberg, another gay rights activist, came close to winning election in the area in 1985, but fell short.
Speaking to City & State a few days ahead of the start of Pride Month, each of the four occupants of the council seat reflected on the strides made for LGBTQ New Yorkers in the past three decades. Duane was elected at the height of the AIDS crisis, before same-sex marriage was legal in New York and before discrimination based on sexual orientation was explicitly prohibited in state law.
But each of the four former and current council members said they were more focused today on what hasn’t yet changed for the better. “Always take a moment just to look back and see how far we’ve come. Because we really have come a very long way,” Duane said. “And then, ‘OK, enough of that.’ Now you have to look forward.”
The war hasn’t been won
After same-sex marriage was recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court as a fundamental right in the 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges ruling, LGBTQ advocates faced a risk that elected officials – at least those open to listening to the community – would pat themselves on the back and consider the war won. “I think many people outside of the LGBT community, and even some people inside the community, thought the battle has been won,” Johnson said of the Supreme Court decision.
Bottcher was eager to draw attention to the need to address the challenges that remain – including ones that have become more urgent on a national scale this year. “The idea of prosecuting parents of trans kids and it being endorsed by mainstream Republican lawmakers, I think there’s a fever pitch to that right now and an edge to it that we haven’t seen in years,” Bottcher said, referring to statesthat have passed laws allowing child abuse investigations into the parents of transgender children.