by Mark Segal
Every year the local LGBT media collaborate in publishing articles pertaining to LGBT history. That year we had thirty publications with a combined print run of 650,000 dedicating numerous feature stories on those LGBT people who had helped create the USA. No longer could the far right wing say, Our founding fathers did not have LGBT people in mind when they created this country.
Chief among the features was a piece I offered for the project.
If it were not for this man, there would be no USA: Baron Frederich Wilhelm von Steuben . . . Von Steuben had a brilliant military mind . . . but he had one problem. He was on the run from several countries for having sex with men.
Luckily, the colonies had a representative in Paris who was there to win the French courts’ financial support for our revolution and find professionals to boost Washington’s failing continental army. His name was Ben Franklin.
Franklin interviewed Von Steuben in his home in Paris. Franklin—the Bill Gates of his day—was impressed with him but also knew of the rumors, and passed on the first interview. Several months went by and now Von Steuben was being hunted down by French clergy. At this point a second meeting took place in Franklin’s home. This time Franklin, understanding the situation, arranged for Von Steuben to be whisked out of Paris on a boat full of armaments and with a letter of introduction to General Washington. I therefore bestowed the title on Franklin as the father of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”
We also featured articles on Abraham Lincoln, a gay African American soldier who led a segregated troop in the American Revolution, President James Buchanan, Katharine Lee Bates (writer of “America the Beautiful”), and yes, our first president, George Washington. All had connections to the community, whether they were allies or gay/lesbian themselves.
To top the project off, I wound up being featured on the front cover of the Philadelphia Daily News, dressed in a Continental Army uniform. The project was a smashing success.
Chapter 14
An Army of Pink Hard Hats
That night in 2005 when I asked Jason, “Do you think I can raise nineteen or twenty million dollars to build an affordable LGBT senior living facility?” he looked me in the eye and said, “Of course.” He might have believed so, but to me it was a pie-in-the-sky dream, and that’s what the project became. Inspiration had begun in 1998, when we received a state grant to look at issues facing LGBT seniors.
We conducted a survey, the results of which surprised us all. The number-one issue facing LGBT seniors was housing. Not only the issue of affordability, which affected them like all communities, but the treatment of these seniors in existing low-income housing. Many people seemed to think that “gay” and “low income” could not be uttered in the same sentence. We were being stereotyped as typically childless, two-income households with lots of disposable funds. This was incorrect.
Significant credit was due to Mike O’Brien, my state representative who identified with the problem and was responsive to my interest in creating LGBT-friendly affordable housing for seniors. His advice was simple and something that nobody had told me in a long time: “Mark, you’re not pushy enough.” Mike, a proud, heavyset, blue-collar Irish Catholic member of our state legislature, sat me down along with his chief of staff, Mary Isaacson, to tell me the political facts of life as he saw them.
“Mark, you’ve supported the Democratic Party for forty years and you finally want something back. It may not be for yourself, but you want something and they owe it to you. It’s about time you start demanding. Be pushy again.”
Mike was correct, and that chat is what really put this project on the road to becoming a reality. Once again I was not knocking politely on doors—I was busting them down. But it started a little before those words of wisdom from Mike.
“Senator!” Every time I made a pilgrimage to State Senator Vince Fumo’s office in South Philly, he knew the bite was coming. “If we’re going to get this senior building off the ground, we’ll need some seed funds.”
“How much do you think you’ll need?”
There’s a personal rule in politics that has served me well. It’s called the 50 percent rule: you ask for 50 percent more than you hope to get. “A million would work,” I replied.
Now, if memory serves me well, his response was somewhere along the lines of, “What the fuck?” Then he continued: “We’re talking about a first-of-its-kind, historic project—with a long road we’ll have to maneuver.” He just stared at me, half in disbelief and half in amusement. “No one would ever—”
“But Vince, you know this is needed and you know there’s no other way.”
As I left he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
The project trudged along after that conversation, but a couple of years later I got a letter in the mail from the Department of Community and Economic Development saying that my organization had been awarded a grant for $500,000.
The funding gave us the ability to do what had become a pattern with each of my successful initiatives: find a partner who can look after the details. After all, I may have a strong vision but I sometimes lack skills in the small-details department. From Mark Horn and Gay Youth, to Harry Langhorne with the Gay Raiders, Jane Shull with AIDS Awareness Day, Andrew Park and Andy Chirls with the domestic partnership crusade, Dan Anders and Jeff Guaracino and the Elton John concert, the incredible staff at Philadelphia Gay News who allow their publisher the time for other endeavors, and Klayton Fennell at Comcast-NBCUniversal—I always surrounded myself with top-notch and highly skilled professionals. Each one was an equal partner, keeping me on track and sometimes in order. And they all had something in common: they were much smarter and much more diplomatic than I am, and they paid attention to details.
Now I needed a partner for what would become the biggest project of my career—the $19.5 million facility would be the largest LGBT building project in the nation created entirely with government funds and tax credits. Enter Micah Mahjoubian.
As he tells the story: “I joined the project around October 2010. I remember being worried about paying the bills. It was after I had finished the Arlen Specter campaign. My only client was Ceisler Media and it wasn’t enough. My dog needed surgery and I had no way of paying for it. I literally ran into you on the street with my dog after we got the news from the vet and I said that I didn’t know how I was going to pay for it. I said I needed work, and I was interested in helping on the project. You immediately said that was a good idea. I’ve been thankful ever since.”
Micah is a brilliant political operative; he had been an openly gay member of Mayor John Street’s administration, as well as a cochair of the local LGBT Democratic Club. He’s also very tech savvy. He entered the project as we were finalizing the concept of building the apartments on top of the existing LGBT Community Center, which was actually the second location that we explored. The original location, proposed by Senator Fumo, was an old army armory on South Broad Street that was then being used for once-a-week bingo games. The games were somehow sponsored by the archdiocese and run by a South Philly doctor. The building was in major disrepair, which made it a perfect candidate. We had to talk the archdiocese and the doctor into the deal. Things had been going well, but then the federal prosecutor raided Vince’s offices and began to crack down on his staff and friends. While everything we had done was above board, I didn’t want to get embroiled in the publicity circus. So I sent the money—that $500,000 grant—back to the state. Two months later, at my annual holiday party, Governor Ed Rendell walked in the door with an angry face. He grabbed me, took me into a corner, and snapped, “Mark, you never give money back to the state. Do you know how many nonprofits would kill for those funds?” As I explained that we didn’t want to get caught in the middle of whatever investigation was going on, he began to calm down, and I recognized the look that now crossed his face. He had a solution to the problem. “I’ll reissue the money from the governor’s office.” And he gave me one final piece of advice: “Use it correctly.” We
did. It was the seed money that kept us moving.
A couple of years later I was in the governor’s office asking for more. So began an endless procession of meetings with public officials and department heads to find the right formula for the funding. “Equality” was now a key word, and we ran with it, arguing that we were pursuing this project in the same way that Catholic charities and Jewish federations do their senior homes. All we wanted was equality, to be able to build our project in the same way. The first group to understand this was the team at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. With the assistance of HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, and his able deputies Dr. Raphael Bostric and my longtime friend Estelle Richman, we became the first federally designated project with the acceptable designation “LGBT-friendly.” That in turn allowed us to apply for funding.
Sometimes when you’re so involved with numerous meetings to secure funding, gain community support, and round up corporations to partner with, you lose sight of why you’re even doing the project.
* * *
I remember Veronica, a women in her late sixties, who told me that as she and her partner of thirty years neared retirement age, they faced the real possibility of homelessness. Both women had worked their entire lives, but never earned enough to save for retirement. Both volunteered their time caring for those in shelters and hospices, and now they were in need of the very care that they provided—but where would they turn?
Donald, sixty-two, was a former teacher and longtime activist in the LGBT community. Surviving on Social Security disability for the past twenty years, his arthritis and neuropathy made living alone in a third-floor walk-up—his only affordable option—more difficult with each passing day. Why shouldn’t he be able to live with dignity in his golden years among the LGBT community to which he belonged?
Then there were my Gay Liberation Front brothers and sisters. Due to age and illness, some were left isolated, far from the community that they had helped create. There were also those who lived in religious-based low-income homes and were being mistreated by the staff and shunned by the other residents.
This is the first out generation. The way we treat the needs of our pioneers will define our community, just as the call to help our gay youth and trans communities did in the early days of the movement.
And we as a community were failing. Gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny, for many years and up to his death in 2011, had to constantly call friends to request money. In 1957, Kameny was the first US government employee to fight being fired because of his “homosexuality,” thereby launching his activism. He lived long enough to get an apology from the president of the United States, Barack Obama.
Shame on us! Near his death, Frank still lived in his mother’s home (he actually owned it), but to generate the funds to live and be an activist, it was mortgaged to the hilt. Frank’s friends, including Bob Witeck, Charles Francis, Rick Rosendall, and Marvin Carter, took over his finances and attempted to put him on a budget, but somehow Frank, who for years begged, couldn’t or wouldn’t conform.
The year before Frank died, my friend Jeff Guaracino, who at that time was working to generate tourism in Philadelphia, asked me to help arrange the honoring of some of our early pioneers. So in a parade on July 4, 2010, Frank Kameny rode past Independence Hall in a convertible car with a banner in front stating, Early Gay Rights Pioneers. Forty-six years before to the day, he had been picketing at that same historic building. As always, Frank wore a suit and tie on that hot, humid July 4, but the suit was old and worn. Frank wasn’t begging for funds any longer, but he couldn’t get used to the changes that came late in life. At lunch after the parade, he asked if he was allowed to order anything on the menu.
No senior, much less a pioneer, should find him or herself at an advanced age with little resources from our community. For a long time, seniors were, literally and figuratively, the last issue to be considered.
Frank is a good example of our pioneers who live in poverty. We need systems and assurances in place similar to what we now have for gay youth.
So what does the future hold for our elder community? To answer this question, we should first ask: how much do we know about them? We know much about youth and bullying issues, much about our LGBT citizens in military uniforms, much about those couples who wish to marry and have children. Even those interested in playing professional sports. But what about the elders? We know very little, and that is a sign that our community’s agenda has, for the most part, left them behind.
* * *
Financing for the $19.5 million project would have to come from federal, state, and city funds. It would give seniors a safe, accepting place to call home. Los Angeles was one of the few places helping elders in this way, and a facility in Chicago would open about a year after our ribbon-cutting—but there remained an entire country full of LGBT seniors facing serious housing issues. Success in Philly would be a step in the right direction.
There were zero LGBT senior advocacy programs in our region when we began. We started by funding the Delaware Valley Legacy Fund, which resulted in the creation of the LGBT Elder Initiative spearheaded by a man named Heshie Zinman. We met with every mainstream senior service organization in the region and requested their help and lobbied for their inclusion of LGBT seniors. We asked for seats on governmental senior boards and commissions. And we helped fund another study on the concerns of LGBT seniors, this time by the Philadelphia Health Management Corporation, and once again found that housing was a major issue.
The next step in the process was to decide where to build. I was out looking at buildings on Spruce Street one day and bumped into Dolph Goldenburg, then the executive director of the community center. He asked what I was doing. When I told him in confidence, he said why not build it on top of the center? Dolph is a man courageous enough to think big, and it was a good idea. We could build our space while doing much-needed repairs to the community center. Dolph’s timing could not have been better. The week before, I had met with Richard Barnhart from Pennrose, who would become a codeveloper of the building. The community center gave us a site but not the magic words site control. Without that you cannot apply for low-income tax credits. Up to this point, only a few people knew of the dream, namely our board, consultants, the elected officials who had agreed to fund us, and our development partner, Pennrose. But in order for Pennrose to draw up plans, they needed to know the full and true condition of the community center and we needed the center’s board to give us a document that included those two words. We enlisted the support of the center’s cochairs and asked them not to tell anyone what we were planning, including their own board. They nervously and bravely shepherded the project, up until it was time to get the paper with the words site control. In order for us to receive the tax credits needed for the project we had to present that document to the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency, which was headed by Brian Hudson. We staged an all-out lobbying campaign to get those tax credits and he, poor guy, was on the receiving end. But instead of asking us to stop, he actually encouraged us, realizing that we might be needed later for public support. It must also be stated here that the staff at PHFA, a state agency then controlled by a Republican governor, gave us every bit of support requested. They treated us as equals. Which is all that we asked.
When we went to the full community center board for approval, it was the first time they had heard of the project; we had successfully kept it quiet. Yet there was one additional hurdle: Dolph was about to leave the center to move to Atlanta. Enter the new executive director with no knowledge of the project, Chris Bartlett, one of the most affable members of the community. He too was a bit shocked by our news. He knew it would be controversial, but he also understood the difficulties faced by low-income seniors. It was a gutsy move for him to take on the job.
As expected, once we made it public, the project irked some in the gay community. The community center called a public meeting to discuss the proposal. While we were ultimately given a yello
w light to proceed with caution, my takeaway from that meeting was the image of a young man standing up and screaming at the top of his lungs, “If you build this old person’s home on top of the community center, no young people will ever come here again!” After forty long years of fighting, I couldn’t resist yelling, “Ageist!” back at him.
That young man soon left the city to go to school out of state. But there were others in the community who felt the clientele for an LGBT-friendly low-income building would be, in their words, “drug addicts, drag queens, and prostitutes.” My response was that people selling drugs would be in violation of their lease and tossed out. Who would be calling a sixty-two-year-old prostitute? As for the drag queens, bring them on, we want them!
Another element of resistance came from my personal detractors, who met with our major supporters, Governor Rendell and Senator Casey, requesting that they drop their support of the project. We also had some contentious negotiations with the board of the community center over the repairs that would need to occur if we were to build on top of it.
We were simultaneously negotiating with the community center, designing the building with the architects, working with Jacob Fisher of Pennrose to finalize the paperwork that would be submitted to the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency (PHFA) for funding, and explaining to city and state officials that the federal government would accept the term “LGBT-friendly” and that it was not discriminatory in any way. Micah and I were trying to organize an advisory board from the community to ease any problems with the neighborhood associations, and all along keep our eyes out for any new objections that surfaced. We were in heavy negotiations over our contract with Pennrose regarding ownership, property management, and the responsibilities of each party. We also had to work out agreements with unions, since we wanted to have LGBT contractors involved with the construction. It was an incredible juggling act.