Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg signed Int. No. 24 into law on 30 April 2002, with lead sponsor Council Member Bill Perkins and the coordinator of the legislative work group Pauline Park at his side; Ariel Herrera, Christine Quinn and Joe Grabarz stand to her left.

NYAGRA history: 2002

The year 2002 represents a key turning point in the history of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA), a year in which the organization was convulsed by its greatest crisis, a drama which broke out into full public view over the course of the spring and summer. Ironically enough, 2002 was also a year in which NYAGRA would lead a legislative campaign to its successful conclusion, putting the organization on the national map as an effective force in the legislative arena. As in life, so in organizational life: triumph mixed with tragedy; or, to put it somewhat more dramatically, tragedy that threatened to undermine NYAGRA just at the very moment of our greatest organizational triumph.

The backdrop to the NYAGRA crisis was the struggle over the issue of transgender inclusion in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA). In June 2001, the bill seemed to be moving forward, after many years in which it had passed the New York State Assembly but had been declared dead on arrival in the Senate. Charles King, executive director of Housing Works, which by this point housed NYAGRA and its paid staff, approached me early in the summer of 2001 about a plan to lobby the state legislature on transgender inclusion in SONDA.

Charles King insisted that NYAGRA, as the only statewide transgender advocacy organization, could block SONDA if the organization joined Housing Works in lobbying the lead sponsors in the Assembly and the Senate. In response, I told Charles that a decision of such importance was for the board of directors to make, not for me alone, but that NYAGRA had always been focused on gaining legal rights for transgendered and gender-variant people, not denying rights to non-transgendered lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people. I also pointed out that NYAGRA, as a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation, NYAGRA was limited in its ability to lobby on pending legislation, to which Charles responded that such restrictions would not preclude the organization from joining Housing Works and the Empire State Pride Agenda in sponsoring a one-day conference in Albany. At the meeting of an ad hoc coalition on SONDA that summer, Matt Foreman, then-executive director of ESPA, had offered to help organize just such a conference, and Charles King had countered by offering $5,000 if ESPA would offer $5,000 and NYAGRA would put up $10,000.

Given that NYAGRA had only very recently received a $50,000 grant, and that our current grant income was only around $70,000, and even that funding not purposed for underwriting such a conference, it seemed to me foolish at best to spend a full one-seventh of our income on a one-day conference, even if we could persuade our funders to approve the use of that funding to organize such a conference.

At our board retreat in August, I raised the issue with board members, who agreed with me and voted unanimously to reject Charles King’s proposal; at that meeting, Jamie Hunter, as our one paid staff member, took notes on a laptop, notes which documented the unanimous board vote rejecting the Housing Works proposal:

“…Motion that we graciously decline Charles’ offer.  Passed unanimous…”

In addition to agreeing with me that the expenditure of $10,000 on a one-day conference was imprudent, my board colleagues also agreed that the position of NYAGRA on SONDA must be that we could not support the bill because it was not transgender-inclusion but that we would not oppose it, because we supported rights for non-transgendered LGB people.

Over the course of the next four months, David Valentine, Hawk Stone, and I — as the three members of the human resources and administration committee (HRAC) — came to consensus that Jamie Hunter had proved ineffective as a paid staff member, and that if her performance did not improve within a relatively short period of time, that we would need to terminate her, and I communicated that consensus to Jamie in December 2001.

In January 2002, NYAGRA held one of its relatively rare in-person board meetings, with all members present, as well as two of the three board member candidates.  Andrea Sears,  Liz Loeb, and Cynthia Kern had been elected to positions created at the August 2001 board retreat as non-voting members of the board who were candidates for full membership. However, at the time of their election to board candidacy, neither Andrea nor Jamie had divulged the fact that they were involved with each other in a primary relationship, a potential conflict of interest, given that Andrea, as a board member, would be in a position of general supervisory responsibility over her lover, even if Andrea was not a member of the committee that directly supervised Jamie. The conscious decision to keep from the board their relationship and the potential conflict of interest that Andrea’s election to the board would create was only one of many serious instances of dishonesty on the part of both Andrea and Jamie that would mount over the course of the year.

In any case, the January board meeting proved to be among our most important discussions as a board, as we carefully considered (reconsidered, in fact), the SONDA situation and NYAGRA’s position on the legislation. At the meeting, Jamie mentioned that Sylvia Rivera was organizing a demonstration at ESPA headquarters on Hudson Street in the West Village to protest the continued exclusion of transgendered people from SONDA, and she and Andrea aggressively promoted the ostensible value of NYAGRA’s participation in the event. I argued that NYAGRA was still a relatively small and new organization and that much of our support came from non-transgendered LGB people, at least some of whom might not understand our taking a position that could be interpreted as opposition to their rights. I also pointed out that there was no realistic chance of SONDA being amended to include gender identity and expression before its passage in the Senate, as the lead sponsor in the Assembly (Steve Sanders) had already indicated that he would not amend the bill without the express approval of the Pride Agenda (approval which was most decidedly not forthcoming), but that passage of Int. No. 24 — the transgender rights bill pending in the New York City Council — was virtually assured now that we had a new Speaker who was one of the co-sponsors of the bill. Alienating ESPA over SONDA at the expense of Intro 24 would be, in effect, to risk throwing away the near certainty of a local transgender rights law for the sheer gratification of defying the Pride Agenda.

Over the loud objections of Jamie and Andrea, I proposed that the board vote to reaffirm our position of neutrality on SONDA and to decline participation in the demonstration against ESPA. Neither Andrea nor Liz could vote, and Cynthia was not present, but all of the full members of the board voted in favor of my proposal, in the presence of both Andrea and Jamie. As a member of the NYAGRA staff, Jamie was under the direction of the board and bound to respect an explicit and unanimous vote of the board of directors; and so it was with astonishment that I found an advertisement for the anti-ESPA demonstration in Gay City News that Saturday that included NYAGRA’s name as one of the organizational sponsors.

It was absolutely clear to me that NYAGRA’s name could not have been included in that list without Jamie, but when I confronted her in a phone call, she denied having any knowledge of the inclusion of NYAGRA’s name in the ad, instead insisting that it was Sylvia Rivera who had made the decision to include NYAGRA’s name in the ad. But when I asked for a phone number for Sylvia so that I could speak to her about it, Jamie told me that Sylvia was in the hospital and was unreachable; it was apparent to me at the time that that excuse was a subterfuge, and Paul Schindler, the editor of Gay City News, would later confirm in a phone call that Jamie had placed the ad, just as I had suspected; Sylvia may have paid for the ad, but had had no involvement with its construction or placement, Paul told me. But to cover her tracks, Jamie told me that all contact with Sylvia had to go through Rusty Mae Moore; when I asked if I could speak with Rusty, Jamie told me that Rusty, too, was unreachable.

I had always treated Jamie with the greatest respect, and my two phone conversations with her that Sunday and Monday were the only occasions on which I had even raised my voice; but it was clear to me that Jamie was lying to me and that she had directly contravened the express will of the board of directors, working to undermine NYAGRA’s position on SONDA, even though she had been at the August 2001 board retreat at which we had initially voted in favor of that position and at the January board meeting at which we had voted unanimously to reaffirm it. Such an action by a paid staff member in direct defiance of the explicit will of the board of directors would be considered a terminable offense by any board in any organization.

By this point, Jamie’s attempt to deceive me as to the placement of the ad in GCN had raised my suspicions, and when I stopped by the Housing Works office on W. 13th St. where NYAGRA had a desk, I decided to check the documents and e-mail on the NYAGRA computer. Given the legal disputes that were soon to ensue, it is important to point out that the computer was the NYAGRA computer, not Jamie’s personal property nor that of Housing Works. And as a NYAGRA employee, Jamie had no reasonable expectation of privacy regarding anything on the NYAGRA computer, her claims to the contrary notwithstanding. Furthermore, Jamie knew that I used the computer frequently when I came into the Housing Works office, so it should have been no surprise to her that I would turn it on when I came in that Tuesday afternoon. When I turned on the computer, I discovered e-mail messages and Microsoft Word documents that clearly implicated Jamie in what can only be termed a conspiracy to undermine NYAGRA and its organizational position on the pending SONDA bill.

Among those documents was a flyer to be distributed by fax announcing the anti-ESPA demonstration which only Jamie could have put on the computer, along with a host of e-mail messages going as far back as September documenting her complicity in Charles King’s plot to undermine SONDA and ESPA. Upon reading the documents and the e-mail messages, it became clear to me that Charles had refused to take ‘no’ for an answer, and after communicating to him the NYAGRA board’s unanimous decision to decline his proposal for NYAGRA involvement in an effort to lobby against SONDA, Charles had enlisted Jamie’s participation in that effort. In effect, Charles had turned Jamie into a Housing Works employee, even while she was still being paid by NYAGRA grant funding — grant contracts that explicitly prohibited lobbying on pending legislation. Charles had enticed Jamie into a political relationship whose objective to lobby against SONDA’s passage was in direct contravention of the express will of the NYAGRA board of directors — clearly communicated to both Charles and to Jamie — as well as in contravention of 501(c)(3) law and the terms of our grant contracts. Jamie was risking NYAGRA’s 501(c)(3) status in order to advance an agenda in direct opposition to the organization’s position, something that no board of directors of any 501(c)(3) could or would tolerate. Outrageously, Jamie would attempt to use my discovery of her betrayal of the NYAGRA board and of the organization to oust me from the board of directors.

After the discovery of Jamie’s illicit activities, I immediately called Hawk Stone and Stuart Chen-Hayes, the two members of the board whose advice and counsel I thought would be most useful in such a dangerous situation. Both were shocked and both made it clear that they considered Jamie’s activities a terminable offense. Hawk urged me to remove the computer from Housing Works in order to prevent Jamie or Charles from destroying the evidence of the conspiracy. I went home that evening extremely disheartened and called David Carter, an old friend of mine who lived in Greenwich Village, not far from the Housing Works office. I told David of Hawk’s advice. David did not attempt to sway me one way or the other, but he did offer to keep the NYAGRA computer at his apartment if I should decide to remove it from Housing Works. And so, the next day, I went into the office on W. 13th St. and unplugged the computer after printing out a few documents, carefully placed the tower in a large shopping bag, and carried it out the door, hailing a taxi to take me to David’s apartment, where I stored it for the time being. On Hawk’s advice, I left a short hand-written note telling Jamie that I had taken the computer in for repair and that I would be bringing it back to Housing Works as soon as it was repaired.

When Jamie discovered the note and found the computer missing, she must have gone into a panic, realizing that I now had all of the evidence that I needed to seek her termination, should I wish to do so. Significantly, Jamie immediately went to Donna Cartwright, a founding board member with whom I had a rather ambivalent relationship. It had become apparent to me that Donna was jealous of me, envious of the position of public prominence that I had attained as an activist since leading the campaign for Int. No. 24 — despite the fact that she had rejected my entreaties to take up the position of coordinator of that campaign. After Jamie told Donna about the computer, they went to Charles King, who then issued a directive banning me from the premises and ordering me to return the computer immediately — despite the fact that he, as executive director of Housing Works, had no authority over me or Jamie, much less any claim on the computer, which was NYAGRA property.

Charles King, then executive director of Housing Works (now CEO)

The directive ordered me banned not only from the Housing Works office on W. 13th St. where NYAGRA had a desk and a mail box, but also from all Housing Works property throughout the city, including offices, bookstores and thrift stores. Branding me a banned person was a conscious attempt on Charles King’s part to undermine my supervisory role, as it would seriously reduce my ability to supervise Jamie’s work, assuming that she was doing any legitimate work for NYAGRA.

At the bill signing ceremony for Int. No. 24 on 30 April 2002, Melissa Sklarz, Council Member Margarita Lopez, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Commissioner Patricia Gatling (front row); Diana Montford, Jamie Hunter, Andrea Sears, Pauline Park, Council Member Bill Perkins, Council Member Helen Sears, Council Member Bill de Blasio, Council Member Christine Quinn, Joe Grabarz of the Empire State Pride Agenda, and Mark Newman (counsel to the General Welfare Committee).

The post NYAGRA history: 2002 appeared first on Pauline Park.

On the steps of City Hall at the press conference on 29 February 2000 announcing the public launch of the campaign for Int. No. 24, the New York City transgender rights bill. Front row: Council Member Margarita Lopez, Council Member Philip Reed, Juan Figueroa (executive director of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense & Education Fund), Pauline Park, Council Member Ronnie Eldridge, Council Member Bill Perkins. Second row: Charles King (executive director, Housing Works), Carrie Davis, Council Member Gifford Miller, Melissa Sklarz, Donna Cartwright, Council Member Christine Quinn.

A history of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA)
Part I: the founding (1998-2000)

Of all the organizations that I have been involved with, I am probably most closely associated in the public mind with NYAGRA.

The idea for the organization now known as the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy (NYAGRA) originated in a conversation that I had with Paisley Currah in May 1998.  Paisley and I drove down to Washington D.C. for GenderPAC’s national lobby day, the second that we would participate in. While on the drive back up, Paisley turned to me and said, “You know, Pauline, we can do this in New York.” Paisley (who at that point was still using feminine pronouns but who transitioned several years later) pointed out that there was not a single transgender advocacy organization in the state that was actively engaged in the legislative arena.

I pointed out that I was at that moment on the board of directors of Queens Pride House, on the steering committee of Gay Asian & Pacific Islander Men of New York (GAPIMNY), and coordinator of Iban/Queer Koreans of New York (Iban/QKNY). In short, I honestly felt that I did not have the time to get involved with founding another organization.  But Paisley persisted, and I agreed to help her with the new organization as long as I did not end up as its leader. Paisley’s organizational experience at that point was limited to participation in the Ithaca chapter of ACT-UP, a non-organization of an organization, and so her desire for my active involvement was perfectly understandable.

Paisley asked me to come up with a name for the organization, and so I thought through various possibilities, all of which had to have ‘New York’ and ‘Gender’ in them. It seemed to me that an actual acronym that spelled a word would be more effective and more memorable than a mere abbreviation. After much mental gymnastics, I eventually came up with ‘New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy,’ which conveniently spelled ‘NYAGRA.’ That acronym evokes images of Niagara Falls, of course, which is a universally recognized landmark in the state. Paisley loved the name, and so did the other activists who attended our first meeting.

Paisley and I conferred on the activists that we should invite to the first meeting, but she left it to me to convene the meeting, which I did on June 30. David Valentine served as the gracious host for that historic first meeting, though his apartment in Greenwich Village unfortunately lacked air conditioning. Seven of us gathered around 1:30 p.m. on that hot June day in 1998: Paisley, David, and me, along with four others. Rosalyne Blumenstein was then the director of the Gender Identity Project at the Lesbian & Gay Community Services Center (since renamed the LGBT Community Center) and as such was at that moment far and away the best-known and most prominent transgender activist in the city. Carrie Davis was a peer counselor at the GIP and would succeed Roz as director a few years later. David was at that time a Ph.D. candidate at New York University and was actually working on a dissertation on transgender. Paisley was at that point an assistant professor of political science on tenure track at Brooklyn College. Donna Cartwright was a copy editor at the New York Times.

Roz left the new organization after a dispute over her role in it. NYAGRA working group members decided to hold a meeting on October 24, concurrent with the TransWorld conference at the Audre Lorde Project in Brooklyn. TransWorld was the first conference by and for transgendered people of color in New York (and anywhere in the United States, as far as I knew), and it was jointly sponsored by ALP (a community center for LGBT people of color) and the GIP; given the GIP’s sponsorship, TransWorld was billed as the fourth in a series of transgender conferences organized under the auspices of the Center and the GIP (‘transexual/transgender health empowerment conferences,’ as the conference promotional material described them).

Until the founding of NYAGRA in June 1998, the GIP had been ‘the only game in town,’ as it were, when it came to transgender advocacy in New York City, and the director of the GIP had been the ‘go-to girl’ for media comment on transgender-related public policy issues as well as social services in the city. As such, Roz carried a great deal of weight; but she harbored resentments against those she felt – rightly or wrongly – had slighted her, and she made clear to those present at the NYAGRA meeting that October 24 that she wanted to use NYAGRA to punish Tim Sweeney for what she had perceived to have been a slight to her.

At the founding meeting on June 30, members had reached consensus about approaching the Empire State Pride Agenda to try to secure transgender inclusion in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) then pending in the New York state legislature. As deputy director of the Pride Agenda (or ‘ESPA,’ as everyone outside the Pride Agenda called it), Tim Sweeney would be a key interlocutor in the larger LGBT community; given that, it seemed to me foolish at best to commence any relationship with ESPA by needlessly offending its deputy director simply to redress a perceived slight pre-dating the founding of NYAGRA that had nothing to do with the organization’s legislative agenda, and I said as much to Roz. All of the founding members at the meeting and all of the new members who joined us at that October 24 meeting were in agreement on that point, and our refusal to allow Roz to use NYAGRA to prosecute her own personal political agenda – at the expense of the credibility and effectiveness of the new organization – prompted her to resign.

Fortunately, from that very first meeting (on June 30), there was an agreement that the primary mission of the organization should be to pursue transgender inclusion in legislation, especially in the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA) and the hate crimes bill both pending in the New York state legislature. All seven activists present at the first meeting agreed on one point: our first inter-organizational meeting should be with the Empire State Pride Agenda. There would be no ‘getting around’ ESPA, which as the leading lesbian and gay political organization in the state, played a leading role in the New York State Hate Crimes Bill Coalition. When it came to SONDA, the Pride Agenda’s role was even more central: ESPA was founded (from the merger of two other organizations) specifically to get SONDA passed, and that gay rights bill was its flagship legislation.

And so on November 19 [check date], several activists representing NYAGRA met with Tim Sweeney (then ESPA’s deputy director) and Paula Ettelbrick (then ESPA’s legislative director) at the Pride Agenda’s office on Hudson Street in Manhattan. The NYAGRA contingent’s aim was to persuade the Pride Agenda to agree to amend both SONDA and the state hate crimes bill to add gender identity and expression in order to protect transgendered and gender-variant people from discrimination and hate crimes, respectively.

With regard to the latter legislation, Tim referred us to the New York State Hate Crimes Bill Coalition, which NYAGRA joined in January 1999; ESPA’s opposition to transgender inclusion in that bill would only become clearer in April 2000, as the bill headed for passage in the state Senate. As for SONDA, Tim stated unequivocally that ESPA was not prepared to consider transgender inclusion in their flagship legislation; he and Paula opined that members of the state legislature were simply not going to support transgender inclusion in the bill – a self-fulfilling prophecy coming from ESPA, as no legislator would brook their opposition to such inclusion.  From ESPA’s perspective, we must have seemed like upstarts, a bunch of transgender activists without any experience in legislative work in Albany or even at the local level. And while the NYAGRA name would become famous, at that moment, in November 1998, we were indeed unknown as an organization without a proven track record in legislative work.

Instead, Tim made a ‘counter offer’ of sorts, proposing that the Pride Agenda work with NYAGRA on local non-discrimination legislation, a suggestion that we ultimately agreed to, after significant internal discussion. It was clear to everyone present on the NYAGRA side – including Paisley Currah, Donna Cartwright, David Valentine, Sophia Pazos, Lisa Maurer (who participated by phone from Ithaca) and myself – that ESPA simply would not be moved on the issue of SONDA and that – as a new group without any resources and without any relationships with key legislators – we had no leverage to move ESPA. It was the unanimous consensus of the founding members of NYAGRA to accept an understanding with ESPA that the two organizations would work together on a local transgender rights bill and defer the question of transgender inclusion in SONDA to a later day.

Meanwhile, the new organization required infrastructure, and an organizational website was one of the first pieces of infrastructure that we could see we would need at the dawn of the Internet age. Paisley had set up a website at www.nyagra.org, though no thought was given at the time that it was technically the webmaster who would therefore be in a position to claim ownership of the website, and not the organization, should a dispute arise over its provenance – as in fact did happen. Meanwhile, the working group began to communicate regularly by e-mail, and David would set up a listserve for the founding members.

Slowly but surely over the course of NYAGRA’s early years, members of the ‘working group’ would begin to construct the rudiments of an organizational framework. But the critical decision that the founding members made at the onset to establish a ‘come one, come all’ policy for the working group would come close to undermining the organization within a year of its founding.

While there was initial consensus on legislative approach, there was dissensus from the start about NYAGRA’s organizational structure from the very beginning. At our very first meeting, I proposed a traditional board structure. Not only did I have no desire to be either president or chair of the board of directors, I was hoping that Paisley would agree to accept the top leadership title. But Carrie Davis insisted that there be “no hierarcy” in NYAGRA’s organizational structure, and Donna Cartwright derided a board structure as being ‘corporate’ and therefore inconsistent with the ideals of the organization. Ironically, Carrie worked for an organization (the Center) that had a very hierarchical staff structure governed by a self-selecting board of directors (i.e., one not chosen by its members), Equally ironic, Donna would go onto serve on the board of directors of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) some years later without any compunction. But on that hot June day in 1998, Carrie and Donna carried the day, defeating my proposal for a traditional board. Donna insisted on calling the assembled activists the ‘working group,’ a moniker that I thought was inappropriate for an advocacy organization, and worse still, insisted that the working group be open to everyone.

Hence the working group, as de facto board of directors, was open to everyone, and no vote could be taken to exclude anyone, regardless of behavior. At the time, I had a strong feeling that the ‘come one, come all’ approach that Donna insisted on and that the other founding members agreed to could lead to serious problems, and that intuition was prescient. In fact, the open door policy would very nearly be the undoing of the organization.

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