Christine Quinn would have been the first woman and the first member of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) community elected mayor of New York City had she won the 2013 mayoral race. The fact that Quinn started the campaign as the clear frontrunner, with polls showing her at somewhere near 40%, but finished a distant third with a mere 15.5% of the vote on September 10, has fueled charges of sexism and homophobia.

“Her sexual orientation and her domestic arrangement may have hurt her,” blogged Lisa Miller (“Christine Quinn Got A Raw Deal—Because She’s a Woman,” New York, 9.13.13), putting her “squarely in society’s most reviled demographic category: middle-aged women without children — the jealous queens and kidnappers of Disney movies. Quinn’s devastating loss stands as proof that in the privacy of the voting booth we are even less post-chauvinist than we are post-racial in our preferences.” How then would Miller explain Letitia James – another middle-aged woman without children – winning first place in the public advocate’s race with 36%?

“Did Christine Quinn Lose the New York Mayoral Race Because of Sexism?,”  asks (New Republic, 9.15.13). “I suppose it’s somehow less hurtful to accuse hundreds of thousands of people of sexism than it is to pick on a specific person,” he writes, pointing out that Miller lacks a ‘coherent argument,’ her case resting on a questionable analogy to the 2008 Obama/Clinton race, which Miller asserts that Obama won purely because of sexist attacks on Hillary. “Next time she indicts a large chunk of the country’s biggest city,” Chotiner concludes of Miller’s assertion, “she should have better evidence than a 2008 presidential campaign—which was utterly unrelated to Quinn’s candidacy—and a handful of adjectives in a New York Times article” referencing polls in which voters described Quinn with terms often used to denigrate women in power. But the mayoral candidate with the highest unfavorable rating was Anthony Weiner (around 55%); Quinn had only the second highest negatives (around 45%).

In fact, Quinn’s status as the only woman and the only LGBT candidate in the mayoral race were arguably two of her biggest assets. Edison Research exit polls showed that primary voters were disproportionately female (54%), which should have helped the only female in the mayoral primary.

“Women don’t support women to the extent they should,” openly lesbian Assembly Member Deborah Glick opined on primary night (“Frontrunner Status Evaporated, Quinn Runs Well Behind de Blasio, Thompson,” Paul Schindler, Gay City News, 9.11.13). But Ruth Messinger won the 1997 Democratic mayoral primary outright with 40% and had none of the problems generating support from other women that Quinn did. “There was a lot of misogyny coming out of the Anyone But Quinn movement,” Glick asserted. But ABQ was co-founded by one woman (Wendy Neu) and another woman (Allie Feldman) was one of its lead organizers.

ABQ was substantially funded by NYCLASS – a 501(c)4 non-profit animal advocacy organization – in response to the Speaker’s having blocked the entire legislative agenda of the city’s animal rights activists, including Donny Moss, a gay constituent of Quinn’s, who played a leading role in the ABQ campaign. But it was not only the Speaker’s role as Cruella de Quinn – enemy of our hoofed friends in Central Park and our furry friends in all five boroughs – that fueled the movement against her, unprecedented in recent mayoral campaign history. In “Roots of Betrayal: The Ethics of Christine Quinn,” gay Queens-based activist Louis Flores documented a host of ethical and legal infractions, including the celebrated slush fund scandal that prompted the Speaker to push the term limit extension bill through the Council, allowing Bloomberg – and Quinn herself – to run for a third term. Quinn’s biggest strategic error was her inability to craft an effective or even a coherent response to the palpable voter anger over her instrumental role in enacting legislation that overturned two successive public referenda limiting the terms of the mayor and Council Members.

Quinn started out the primary campaign season as the prohibitive frontrunner with at least the tacit support of billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the active support of a host of wealthy donors, including some of the city’s biggest developers. In contrast, stuck in fourth place around 14% in the polls only a few months before the primary, Bill de Blasio was written off by many.

The first openly gay Council Speaker also had the entire gay political establishment behind her, including the Empire State Pride Agenda, the Stonewall Democratic Club, Lambda Independent Democrats (LID), Gay & Lesbian Democrats (GLID), the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund and the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), along with women’s organizations such as Emily’s Fund and the National Organization for Women-NYC. Quinn was also endorsed by Gay City News, the only LGBT weekly newspaper in New York, along with the New York Times, the New York Daily News and the New York Post.

Quinn also had the support of a dozen labor unions, including two of the biggest unions in the city: 32BJ and the Retail, Wholesale & Department Store Union (RWDSU). She had the backing of the Queens County Democratic Party organization, the most powerful of the city’s political machines, which put her in the Speaker’s chair back in 2005; and over 50 elected officials as well as a host of celebrities and activists (http://www.quinnfornewyork.com).

But despite the backing of the city’s powerful elites, come Sept. 10, Quinn placed a distant third, with a paltry 15.5% of the vote, losing every Democratic Party constituency. Quinn got only 16% of women vs. 39% for Bill de Blasio and 26% for Bill Thompson (“New York City Primary Results,” New York Times, 9.10.13). As Sam Roberts noted (“Identity Politics in a Brand-New Form,” New York Times 9.15.13), “de Blasio carried white women 36 to 26% and black women by a crushing 47 to 6%.” And just as women rejected Quinn by a two-to-one margin, a majority of LGBT voters also rejected her candidacy. Edison found Quinn winning just a third (34%) of self-identified LGBT voters, well behind de Blasio, who won half (47%) of the LGBT vote.

Did 74% of white & 94% of black female Democratic mayoral primary voters follow the lead of some phantom misogynist bogeyman?  Did a wave of homophobia sweep the first openly lesbian mayoral candidate into the dustbin of political history? There simply is no evidence that misogny or homophobia played a role in influencing the primary electorate, which put three new openly gay Council Members in office: Carlos Menchaca in Brooklyn (the 38th Council district), Ritchie Torres in the Bronx (the 15th) and Corey Johnson in Quinn’s own 3rd Council district (“From Three Boroughs, New Gay Councilmen,” by Paul Schindler, Gay City News, 9.10.13). And on that same day that the only female mayoral candidate went down to a crushing defeat, women won primaries for borough president in both boroughs where a woman competed – Gale Brewer in Manhattan and Melinda Katz in Queens.

“I don’t know that the LGBT community is always strategic in their thinking,” Glick added to her entirely non-empirical assessment of Quinn’s defeat. But how ‘strategic’ is to support candidates based purely on their sexual orientation or gender identity, without reference to issues of race, ethnicity, class, economic policy, position on policing issues, or any of the important issues facing this city? As a transgendered Asian American woman, did I have an obligation to vote for Chris Quinn as the only female candidate in the race? Or an obligation to support John Liu as the only Asian American running for mayor? And if those were competing claims, which should have carried more weight? In the end, I voted for the candidate I thought would make the best mayor, Bill de Blasio.

As I see it, a crude identity politics such as Deborah Glick, Lisa Miller and others espouse can do nothing but impoverish public discourse in this city – the most diverse in the United States – and distract us from the pursuit of progressive policy change. Fortunately, on Sept. 10, women and LGBT voters rejected the crude appeal of such a simplistic identity politics; in fact, Quinn even lost her own Council district to de Blasio, a stunning indicator of the complete collapse of her campaign.

The real explanation for the catastrophic collapse of Quinn’s campaign was neither misogyny nor homophobia but the fact that she was a bad candidate who ran an awful campaign and that Democratic primary voters were sick and tired of 12 years of Bloomberg and the mayoral candidate most closely associated with him. Quinn’s Rose Garden strategy was premised on creating the expectation that her nomination was inevitable – and in that regard at least was analogous to Hillary’s failed strategy in 2008. Quinn, like Thompson, ran a general election campaign in the primary, attempting to appeal to moderates and independents whom they believed they would need to attract once they won the nomination; but de Blasio understood that the primary would be won by the candidate who could best appeal to a progressive primary electorate.

Quinn’s failure to distance herself from the mayor meant that she was widely perceived as his tacit choice among the Democrats. Between the Scylla of Quinn’s ties to Bloomberg – including to wealthy donors many of whom were his cronies, and the pro-Bloomberg Democrats who were a significant minority of the primary electorate – and the Charybdis of the more progressive primary voters who were fed up after 12 years of Bloomberg, Quinn was left without a winning campaign theme. Quinn’s claim that she was the only candidate who had ‘delivered for New Yorkers’ rang hollow, an empty slogan reminiscent of the 1988 Dukakis campaign that was all about ‘competence.’ What Quinn had effectively ‘delivered,’ primary voters knew, was a third term for Bloomberg, and that was the real albatross around her neck. In a change election, Quinn was tied inescapably to the Bloomberg administration in which she was de facto deputy mayor, and as de Blasio’s campaign took off in the last few crucial weeks of the campaign by promising regime change, the big dead bird around Quinn’s neck dragged her down and sunk her.

Pauline Park is a transgender activist who participated in the Anybody But Quinn campaign but is not a spokesperson for it; she did her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Illinois.

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SONDA and Transgender Inclusion in Pending State Legislation
by Pauline Park
Member, NYAGRA Board of Directors
January 2002

Recently, there has been much discussion within the transgender community in New York City about the Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Act (SONDA), the ‘gay rights bill’ currently pending in the New York state legislature. I would like to take this opportunity to inform NYAGRA members about NYAGRA’s position on this important piece of legislation.

As most of you know, SONDA does not include any transgender-specific language, and without such definitional language – for example, defining
sexual orientation to include ‘gender identity or expression,’ it is extremely unlikely that any court in this state would interpret such legislation (once enacted) as including transsexual or transgendered people, per se. SONDA defines ‘sexual orientation’ as “heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality, and so a transgendered person could only use the law (once enacted) to sue for discrimination if s/he also identified as lesbian, gay, or bisexual (LGB) and if the s/he could provide clear evidence that the discrimination involved related to his/her identification as LGB, regardless of any discriminatory intent based on gender identity or expression. In practical terms, then, SONDA cannot plausibly be regarded as even remotely transgender-inclusive.

There has been some confusion and misinformation concerning NYAGRA’s position on SONDA. When NYAGRA was formed in June 1998, getting transgender-specific and transgender-inclusive legislation enacted was among our primary goals. The full inclusion of all transsexual, transgendered, and gender-variant people in state human rights law was and remains a fundamental commitment of this organization. The question has been how to achieve that objective. At no time did the NYAGRA board of directors ever accept the proposition that SONDA was acceptable as written. Rather, the question at hand was one of strategy and tactics – how to move the ‘gay establishment’ and the state legislature to support transgender inclusion in state discrimination legislation.

The first decision that the NYAGRA board (then known as ‘the working group’) made was to meet with the the leading lesbian and gay political organization in the state. Tim Sweeney (then deputy director) and Paula Ettelbrick (then legislative counsel) recommended that NYAGRA and ESPA work together first on local legislation and then tackle the state legislature, and we accepted that recommendation.

Those who may be critical of the decision we made back in the fall of 1998 must understand the context in which it was made. NYAGRA was an entirely new organization, with no membership to speak of and no resources. The seven of us who met in David Valentine’s apartment on that hot afternoon on June 28 dreamt of creating an organization that would advocate for all transsexual, transgendered, and gender-variant people in this state; but we were also realistic enough to know that we were not in a position to dictate terms to a well-funded statewide organization that had a dozen full-time paid staff members, a membership of 14,000 or more, and an annual budget of over $1 million and that was – significantly – in a position to serve as gatekeeper on any LGBT-related legislation in the state legislature.

The transgender community (however defined) is a marginalized one with few resources and little political clout, and lags far behind the organized lesbian and gay community in terms of political organization. We in NYAGRA recognized that we could gain far more by working with ESPA than by demanding full transgender inclusion in a state discrimination bill that we were in no position politically to demand. By forming a strategic partnership with the Pride Agenda, we have been able to advance the legislative and political agenda of the transgender community far more effectively than if we had chosen to ‘tilt at windmills.’ ESPA’s support for the New York City transgender rights bill (Int. No. 754) was crucial for us to gain entree to Councilmembers and to give us credibility in the legislative arena.

At the time of NYAGRA’s formation in June 1998, there was not a single transgender political organization in New York City or state working directly and consistently on legislation. It is through NYAGRA’s campaign for Intro 754 that the transgender community has gained credibility in the legislative arena. At the time of the founding of NYAGRA, transgender inclusion in pending city or state legislation was not even seriously discussed in political circles. No lesbian/gay political organization in this city actively supported such inclusion, and no member of the City Council or the state legislature (to our knowledge) had even been approached about inclusion in discrimination or hate crimes legislation.

As we enter 2002, the political landscape has been transformed. Every major political club in New York City – including Gay & Lesbian Independent Democrats (GLID), Lambda Independent Democrats of Brooklyn, the Stonewall Democratic Club, and the Out People of Color Political Action Club (OutPOCPAC), as well as ESPA – has endorsed Intro 754 as well as including a question on Intro 754 on their candidate questionnaires (in most cases, the very first question on those questionnaires) in the 2001 election cycle. As a consequence of the support of these political clubs and crucially of the Pride Agenda, Intro 754 became widely viewed as a barometer of a candidate’s support not only of the transgender community but of the LGBT community as a whole. Remarkably, three of the four leading candidates for the Democratic mayoral nomination (Fernando Ferrer, Mark Green, and Alan Hevesi) endorsed Intro 754 a year before the November 2001 election, and even the one candidate who did not endorse the bill (Peter Vallone) did
not publicly oppose it. The Republican mayoral nominee (Michael Bloomberg) also committed himself to signing the bill, an important endorsement, given his election in November 2001. Both candidates for City comptroller and all five of the leading candidates for public advocate endorsed the bill. And some of the more progressive and LGBT-supportive candidates for City Council even approached NYAGRA proactively to ask that their names be put on the Intro 754 endorsement list.

The transgender community has made progress outside of New York City as well. Gender identity language was been included in the amendment to the Suffolk County anti-discrimination bill signed into law in 2001 as well as in the City of Rochester’s human rights law also enacted last year. And the City of Ithaca passed a hate crimes law that included ‘gender identity or presentation,’ making it the first jurisdiction in the state to explicitly recognize transgender in a hate crimes statute. And when the Dignity for All Students Act (DASA) was reintroduced in the state legislature in January 2001, it became the first piece of legislation ever introduced in that body to include transgender-specific language.

None of this was even conceivable back in June 1998. And so when we consider the issue of SONDA, we must realize how much NYAGRA’s work on Intro 754, DASA, and other pending legislation has raised expectations within the transgender community to a level far above that in 1998, when we (rightly) expected little or nothing of legislators or candidates for public office.

NYAGRA’s position on SONDA is this: state human rights law should and must include all transsexual, transgendered, and gender-variant people, whether through an amendment to pending legislation (such as SONDA), existing statute law (such as an enacted SONDA), or some other mechanism. SONDA is in many ways the ideal vehicle, as it is still pending and given that many legislators simply assume that ‘sexual orientation’ includes transgendered people. However, while we are committed to full transgender inclusion in state anti-discrimination law, we are also committed to working with ESPA where possible while challenging them when necessary. We recognize (as some in the community do not) that there is a two-step process to amending SONDA. First, we (and that ‘we’ includes not only NYAGRA but other transgender organizations and allies) must persuade the Pride Agenda that transgendered people deserve the same protections from discrimination as LGB people; and second, we must persuade the co-sponsors of SONDA in the state legislature to amend the bill.

What some may not recognize is that working at the state level presents greater challenges than working at the local level. While the Assembly is controlled by (generally progressive) LGBT-supportive Democrats, the state Senate is controlled by conservative Republicans who blocked the state hate crimes bill for 12 years because of its inclusion of sexual orientation. (That bill passed the Senate only in June 2000 and was signed into law in July 2001, without transgender-inclusive language.)

It is certainly not NYAGRA that has been blocking transgender inclusion in SONDA. And it is not solely the responsibility of NYAGRA board and staff members to secure full transgender inclusion in state law. Rather, it is the responsibility of all transgendered people and transgender-supportive LGBs and other allies to secure full transgender inclusion in state law. NYAGRA has grown tremendously over the last few years, but it remains a relatively small organization relative to well-established lesbian/gay statewide political organizations; and NYAGRA is a relatively under-funded organization as well, in relation to its mission and its needs (especially when one considers that there is little funding for lobbying or legislative work, which we do entirely on an unpaid volunteer basis). In the last few years since our founding, we in NYAGRA have focused on legislative objectives that we believe are realistically attainable (especially the passage of Intro 754) in order to build a foundation for pursuit of legislative goals whose realization are probably more distant – such as an amendment to SONDA (either pre- or post-enactment).

Members of the transgender community must begin to take responsibility for themselves and realize that they can play a role in the passage of legislation. If they are concerned about inclusion in state law, they can write their representatives in the Assembly and the Senate or visit them in Albany or in their district offices. There is nothing preventing any individual (whether transgender-identified or not) from raising the issue of transgender inclusion in SONDA or any other bill currently pending in the state legislature. Those who have expressed frustration with SONDA’s lack of transgender-specific language need to ask themselves if they have done what they could to secure full transgender inclusion in that bill or other pending legislation.

There is no one organization (let alone any one individual) who can claim to speak for the entire transgender community, and NYAGRA has never claimed to be such an organization. Instead, we in NYAGRA have advocated on behalf of the transgender community (a subtle but important distinction). We have been especially active in those areas where we believed there was a realistic opportunity for legislative action – most particularly with Intro 754, where there is a very good chance of getting the bill passed in the incoming City Council.

The strategic partnership that NYAGRA formed with the Pride Agenda back in the fall of 1998 has paid rich rewards in terms of our ability to advance a transgender legislative agenda. While we have not always succeeded in persuading ESPA to support full transgender inclusion in pending legislation (such as with the state hate crimes bill or SONDA), we have garnered their support for important bills (such as Intro 754)without which it would not have been possible to move that legislation forward.

Politics is ultimately about human relationships, and the relationships that we forged with senior staff – Tim Sweeney (the former deputy director who left ESPA in October 2000) and Matt Foreman (the outgoing executive director who left ESPA in December 2001), in particular – may change as new leadership takes over at ESPA. But we remain committed to working with ESPA staff to the extent possible while also remaining willing to challenge them – even publicly – when necessary. And we remain committed to full transgender inclusion in state law.

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