With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir by Christine Quinn

Author:Christine Quinn [Quinn, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062232489
Publisher: Harpercollins
Published: 2013-06-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

City Council

I stayed with Tom as his chief of staff for nearly six years. It got to the point where I could have done the job with my eyes closed, and I needed a change. Leaving it wasn’t easy, especially because with Tom I had no secrets, but it was time. The job was getting too easy. And when things get too easy, you don’t do them as well. That’s not fair to anybody.

Tom was supportive and encouraged me to reach for something that would be more challenging. “You need to make your mark in the world, separate and apart from me,” he said. And he was right. I needed to do something new. But where was I to go? It would have been great to move up at City Hall, but with Giuliani in office, I could forget about a job on the mayor’s staff (and I wouldn’t have wanted one given our dramatically divergent political views), so I looked outside city government.

I eventually landed a job as executive director of the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project. I’d worked with AVP when I was on Tom’s staff and had a lot of respect for them. They were a good mix of providing direct service and counseling crime victims, and also doing advocacy—trying to change and improve things in the police department. I liked the variety, and I liked the fact that the group’s activities were informed by the real-life experiences of their clients. The closer the work is to the clients, the more you understand their problems and the challenges everybody faces.

Hate crimes were even more rampant then, and AVP played an important role in bringing attention to the problem. During this period our community endured a series of attacks, including murders. These can be challenging crimes to deal with, because if an LGBT person is murdered and wasn’t out, how does the family go to the police about a hate crime? Very often the family would say to AVP, “Don’t say anything” about the fact that the person was gay. But the family really wasn’t our client. Still, despite the stigma, mothers and/or fathers would come to us in search of justice or eventually join in the effort.

When I took over at AVP, my goal was to expand the great work they had done and to enlist the community to put even more pressure on the police department, the district attorney’s offices, and Mayor Giuliani to make the city safer for LGBT people. By now I understood the workings of city government and knew how to get it to pay attention and even follow through. I knew we could fix this by building bridges between our communities and the people in power. For example, back then the police weren’t as well-trained or sensitive about same-sex domestic violence and sexual assault as they are now, and consequently the police weren’t always as responsive as they needed to be, but that’s gotten so much better because of everyone’s work.

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