The Battle For Gay Rights In New York City – a Conversation With Stephen Petrus
Today on Gotham, Adam Kocurek interviews Dr. Stephen Petrus about his new project, a virtual exhibition titled The Battle for Intro. 2: The New York City Gay Rights Bill, 1971 – 1986. Petrus is the Curator, as well as the Director of Public History Programs, at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. This exhibition dives into the story of New York City’s Gay Rights Bill, a local law known as Intro. 2 in the City Council. This was a collaborative project, with faculty and undergraduate students at LaGuardia Community College compiling sources, conducting and recording oral history interviews, and chronicling the many key individuals and moments leading up to the passage of the Gay Rights Bill.
The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Rich Wandel, The Gay Activists Alliance protest the Board of Education in Brooklyn, 1971. Courtesy of LaGuardia and Wagner Archives (hereafter all images courtesy of LaGuardia and Wagner Archives).
What inspired you to pursue this project? Was there a specific catalyst, or did this evolve out of other research projects that you have done?
A: I was inspired to pursue this project because of a lack of scholarship and little public awareness of the subject. There are a few academic articles but not a monograph. The mainstream press coverage throughout the 1970s was especially weak. Journalists often trafficked in stereotypes, and this in fact led to a protest (“zap”) of the media at the Inner Circle dinner in 1972 by the Gay Activists Alliance. Alternative weeklies like the Village Voice and the SoHo Weekly News were more sympathetic but also episodic. The New York City News, an LGBTQ paper in the early 1980s, was most thorough. But the readership of the gay press was relatively small, and writers often engaged in advocacy journalism. I also thought this was a great opportunity to utilize the City Council Collection at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. I found thousands of documents in the legislative files and correspondence of former City Council Members Tom Cuite, Miriam Friedlander, Carol Bellamy, Ruth Messinger, and Carol Greitzer. These sources were largely untapped. What a great opportunity for me and my students to immerse ourselves in these archival records and then add to our LGBTQ Collection at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives through oral history.
Rich Wandel, The Gay Activists Alliance register voters at Jacob Riis Park, 1971.
What is the major takeaway or lesson you would like viewers of this virtual exhibition to walk away with?
A: I think the lesson is the need for constant struggle, advocacy, and lobbying to pass civil rights legislation against strident opposition. I was particularly surprised to learn the nature of this opposition in New York, the quintessential liberal city in the nation. Most New York City Council Members were opposed to a basic measure to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, and public accommodations. New York was the first city to propose such a bill, but the 51st to pass one. One big takeaway is a challenge to the notion that New York City was a “queer friendly” city. How could this be when it took 15 years to pass the legislation?
Rich Wandel, The Gay Activists Alliance protest Fidelifacts Employment Agency, 1971.
NYC’s 1986 non-discrimination law was the 51st of its kind in the nation. The exhibit seems to suggest that religion was, if not the main, a main obstacle to the bill passing, as was conservativism in the outer boroughs. But other cities had conservative constituents and religious presences – what do you think made New York City such a battleground city?
A: The sheer size of the city was a major factor. The population was about 8 million at the time of the bill’s passing. San Francisco had a population of about 1 million. Other cities were even smaller and had fewer dissenting voices. College towns passed bills fairly quickly, such as Ann Arbor. The outer boroughs had strong anti-gay sentiments, yes. If New York City were just Manhattan, the bill would have passed in 1974 when it received a full floor vote in City Council. We had a large population of culturally conservative white ethnics in Staten Island, Queens, and Brooklyn opposed to gay rights. Remember, this was the Archie Bunker era in Queens. Puerto Ricans and African-Americans in the Bronx mostly opposed gay rights. And yes, the Catholic Church was a powerful force in New York City politics. Elected officials were often deferential to Cardinals Terence Cooke and John O’Connor. The police and fire departments were also overwhelmingly opposed. But I want to emphasize that there were dissenting voices in all these groups, such as Dignity, a gay Catholic organization, and GOAL, the Gay Officers Action League. Gay NYPD Officer Charlie Cochrane’s testimony for the gay rights bill in 1981 in City Council was unforgettable.
New York City Council Speaker Peter Vallone addresses an anti-gay rights rally in Manhattan in 1986.
New York City Council Majority Leader Thomas Cuite with members of the Catholic sisterhood.
Were there any unexpected insights or discoveries you made while working on this project?
A: I gained insight about New York City Council in the 1970s and 80s and, in particular, I learned about Tom Cuite, the Majority Leader from 1969 to 1985. He was one of the most powerful figures in New York City politics. He was based in Brooklyn and represented Park Slope, Windsor Terrace, Cobble Hill, and other neighborhoods. Cuite was a devout Catholic, born in 1913, and came of age politically during the mayoralty of Fiorello LaGuardia during the New Deal. He served in World War II. He was a product of the Brooklyn political machine. His Catholicism was shaped by the encyclicals of Pope Pius XII in the 1940s and 1950s. The gay rights bill needed to pass out of the General Welfare Committee in City Council in order to get a full floor vote. Cuite appointed anti-gay Council Members to General Welfare, such as Aileen Ryan of the Bronx, to ensure it would not move forward. Cuite also acted as an advisor to Cardinals Spellman, Cooke, and O’Connor. So much for the separation of church and state. Cuite worked closely with Mayors John Lindsay, Abe Beame, and Ed Koch and compromised on many issues. But he refused to budge on gay rights. He had liberal views on labor and housing but was socially conservative. Many New York elected officials in fact were liberal on kitchen table issues but not on gay rights. Cuite is a forgotten figure overlooked by urban and political historians. I live by Thomas Cuite Park in Brooklyn and tell my neighbors about him all the time. They never heard of him.
New York City Council Majority Leader Thomas Cuite.
Ed Koch features heavily as a character in this virtual gallery. How do you think your project contributes to his fraught legacy? No New York City group seems to both love and hate Koch as much as LGBT people, and the testimony surrounding him paints, I think, a very human and nuanced portrait of the politician and the man that answers some questions but raises many more.
A: This exhibit will not give the final answer on Ed Koch because many people were critical of him while others were appreciative, even empathetic. He was born in 1924, served in World War II, and came of age in the 1950s; Koch was a product of a different era. He actually had a stronger record on gay rights when he served as a Manhattan Congressman from 1969 to 1977 than as mayor from 1978 to 1989 and decided to appeal to socially conservative white ethnics in the outer boroughs. There was a view among many gay activists in the 1970s that you do not out people unless they are actively opposed to gay rights. This sentiment is expressed in the testimony of Christopher Lynn, who served as legal counsel to the Coalition of Lesbian and Gay Rights. John LoCicero, who was special advisor to Koch, was defensive of him, while gay activists like Andy Humm and Allen Roskoff denounced him. They argue that he was too deferential to council members opposed to gay rights out of religious conviction. Wasn’t it the job of the mayor to champion the civil rights of a group that faced intense discrimination? Koch was a complex figure. People will view this exhibit and have strong feelings. I believe historians and others will debate Ed Koch for years to come, and I think this project will play a role in that discourse.
You write that these accounts illuminate a civil rights movement surprisingly neglected by historians and mostly unknown to the citizens of New York City. Why do you think that is the case?
A: I am not sure why many queer historians and other scholars have not grappled with the gay rights bill. It may be overshadowed by AIDS and histories of AIDS activism. For example, Sarah Schulman’s work Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993 is excellent but concentrates on the era after the gay rights bill was passed. In general, there has not been much memorable work on City Council. It is hard for me to say why. Scholars have written about the Gay Activists Alliance, which was formed in 1969 in the wake of Stonewall but not on the Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights, which emerged in the wake of Anita Bryant’s campaign against gay rights in Miami in 1977. There was a documentary released soon after the passage of the bill by Phil Zwickler called Rights and Reactions, but this account mostly highlighted a City Council public hearing in 1986 on the eve of the vote. Journalist Eric Marcus has done fine work on aspects of the gay rights bill in his podcast Making Gay History. But, again, we need a comprehensive study. All of this is to say that the subject presented a wonderful opportunity for me and my students to conduct oral history interviews and examine archival records and create an exhibit to inform researchers and the public at large.
Rich Wandel, The Gay Activists Alliance protest City Council Majority Leader Tom Cuite, 1971.
What I find fascinating is that there are some clear disagreements between the oral history participants, such as between Andy Humm and John LoCicero. As someone who does public history, do you have any personal philosophy with respect to curating disagreement?
A: I wanted to give exhibit participants a platform to reflect and express their views. My students and I conducted oral history with activists and former City Council Members. Sure, we would follow up and press our narrators to elaborate and clarify, but, in the end, we wanted to hear their voices and ultimately present their perspectives. We intentionally did not offer the final word on figures like Tom Cuite and Ed Koch. Instead, we hope exhibit visitors will listen to the oral history testimony and examine the archival material and develop their own views. We know that oral history has limitations. Narrators forget things, embellish their roles, romanticize the past; they omit and overstate. It’s all subjective. Many gay activists were emotional and even territorial about who should get credit for what. They were coming of age in the 1970s at a turbulent and exciting time in the history of gay rights. This of course was the era when the personal was political.
Rich Wandel, New York City Council hearing on the Gay Rights Bill, 1971.
I’ll give you an example – the 1972 Inner Circle zap by Gay Activists Alliance (GAA) members. This came up in a few interviews. In 1972, several GAA members attended the Inner Circle annual formal dinner, organized by the New York media to raise money for charitable causes. The GAA was angry at the biased coverage of the gay rights movement. They somehow got tickets to attend and disrupted the dinner, yelling, this dinner is over! We will not allow any more homophobic coverage of our movement! I’m paraphrasing, of course. It caused a melee, and gay activists like Jim Owles and Allen Roskoff were attacked. Owles nearly lost his eye at the hands of Michael Maye, the leader of the firefighter’s union and a former Golden Gloves boxer. The conventional narrative is that GAA member Morty Manford was beaten badly and hospitalized. Subsequently, his mother, Jeanne Manford, started PFLAG, one of the most important queer organizations and support groups in the nation. This story has been repeated over and over again to the point that it is now the standard account. Other activists, like Allen Roskoff, claim that Manford was not badly beaten and that his role was exaggerated and subsequently mythologized. Some will probably say, so what? What’s the big deal about the particulars of this event? Well, putting your body on the line for a cause was the highest form of commitment. Think about the Freedom Riders in 1961 getting pummeled by segregationists during the civil rights movement. These figures almost became martyrs, Christ-like. So, the story of Morty Manford putting his body on the line for gay rights put him on a pedestal. The fact that his sacrifice led to the founding of PFLAG increases the significance. But did it really happen?
Gay activist Morty Manford marches with his mother Jeanne Manford, founder of P-Flag, at the third annual Christopher Street Liberation Day March, 1972.
“Bullshit,” “Homophobic Geography of New York City,” “Uptown or Downtown Dyke” – the titles and contents of many oral history excerpts seem to suggest that space is an important recurring theme in this project. How has this project made you reimagine New York City as a heterogeneous space, considering that many scholars and non-academics alike often describe it as a monolith, or single entity?
A: This is an important point. I was keen on reflecting about the geography of New York. Neighborhood by neighborhood, even block by block, this city is incredibly diverse. In our “Gay New York, Homophobic New York” exhibit section, interviewees said that there were certain streets that they did not feel safe walking on. Former City Council Member and State Senator Tom Duane recounts a story from 1980 when he was a community leader in Chelsea, in which he spearheaded an initiative to do something about the physical danger towards gay men at the Fulton Houses in the neighborhood. Former City Council Members Sal Albanese from Brooklyn and Fernando Ferrer from the Bronx recall why they voted for the bill in 1986 despite rampant homophobia in their districts. I gained a new appreciation for how certain spaces were simply not safe for gay folks, at least not for gay people who could not “pass” as straight. I want exhibit visitors to have a new appreciation for the dynamic queer and anti-queer diversity of New York City.
PFLAG supporters at a gay rights event.
With your past projects, undergraduate students played important roles in conducting interviews, taking photographs, and more. What roles did students play in this exhibit, and were they different from past projects?
A: This exhibit was different from past projects like our exhibits A Seat at the Table on LGBTQ representation in New York politics and First Grade Culture Wars on the Children of the Rainbow Curriculum controversy of 1992. I trained students in oral history methods. It was delightful to see them engage with activists and politicians. We traveled to their homes and filmed the interviews, if the narrators lived in New York City. It was like doing field work, very empowering for the students. Previous projects were done on Zoom due to the pandemic. Students also did archival research, immersing themselves in the City Council Collection. What a rare opportunity for community college students. Under the direction of Associate Professor of Communication Studies Poppy Slocum, CUNY Grad Center history doctoral candidate Soheil Asefi, Ginger Brown of the New York City Department of Education, and myself, students developed a curriculum on the gay rights bill for New York City high school students. Maureen Drennan, Associate Professor of Photography, trained students to take portraits of the exhibit participants. Students were involved in every facet of the project. I am so proud of them.
Catholic priests march in a gay rights event. On the right is Father Bernárd Lynch.
Where do you want to go next with your research?
A: AIDS. Our next project will be on AIDS policy, investigating how New York City responded to the AIDS crisis from 1981 to the mid-1990s. Yes, there has been a tremendous amount done on AIDS, but we have collections that have not been researched yet. Tom Duane donated his papers to us years ago – the first openly gay man elected to City Council in 1991, openly HIV-positive. His papers will shed light on policy and social services. HIV/AIDS activist Joyce Hunter recently donated some of her papers to us at LaGuardia. The other portion of her archive is at the LGBT Center on West 13th Street. We’ll also draw from the Ed Koch and City Council Collections at the Archives. That will be our next big project – AIDS policy, legislation, and social services here in New York City. We want to gain insight into what was done and not done and focus in particular on race. Traditional narratives centering on the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC), ACT UP, and other organizations have often inadequately addressed race. This will be a two-year project and will involve both archival research and oral history.
Stephen Petrus is the Director of Public History Programs at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives.
Adam Kocurek is is a PhD candidate in modern American history at The CUNY Graduate Center. His research lies at the intersections of labor history, the history of activism, and the history of education. He currently holds a position at Hunter College.