With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir

by Christine Quinn

  Another citywide issue I got involved in through Tom’s office back in the day still isn’t resolved: New York City’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade. When Tom was first running for office in 1991, the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization (ILGO) applied to be a contingent in the parade, but its application was denied on ostensibly procedural grounds that made no sense at all. Procedure was obviously not the real issue. The people who run the parade, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, see it as a Catholic parade. They don’t want LGBT people included in any visible way. The fact that actively Irish LGBT people exist didn’t make any difference to them. Lawsuits followed, and the Hibernians have not budged in the two decades since.

  Once Tom was elected, for the first St. Patrick’s Day he was in office, he didn’t march. At that time, for an elected official of any kind, let alone one of Irish ancestry, not to march was a big statement. After that we asked elected officials to pledge not to march as long as ILGO was banned. Most affirmatively signed the pledge and said, “I won’t march.” Others didn’t sign, then just didn’t march, and still don’t march. And statewide elected officials often find a way to be off in a far corner of the state on St. Patrick’s Day.

  Over the decades, we offered many compromises in response to their stated objections: You don’t want a contingent behind an identifiable LGBT banner? Forget banners! We’d march behind the City Council banner. Sashes are a big thing in the parade—people wear ones with the name of the county they or their families are from. So LGBT people could wear a rainbow sash. Or they could wear a sticker with a shamrock on top of a pink triangle. In 2007 my father, Kim, a contingent of councilmembers and Irish American activists, and I were invited to march as a group in Dublin’s official St. Patrick’s Day Parade wearing those exact stickers. We were trying to come up with some identifiable way marching would work in New York. Think of it—it’s okay in Dublin, but not on Fifth Avenue. Sadly, nothing so far has worked. I’m hoping that the next generation of AOH leadership will come to a fair compromise, so we can put this issue behind us. But for now, you won’t find me marching in the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

  During my time with Tom, one extremely contentious citywide issue got resolved; it involved an unexpected and very high-profile battle with the city’s newly elected and combative mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. One of the first things Giuliani wanted to do after taking office was to eliminate the Division of AIDS Services. I don’t think the mayor had any idea that his plan to kill DAS would cause such an uproar, and in the beginning I’m not sure he appreciated the significance of DAS or the essential services it provided. Maybe he just saw it as an easy thing to cut from the budget. I don’t think he thought it was going to be a citywide battle.

  We found out about Giuliani’s plans from a source inside City Hall, and we passed the information right along to the media. This was on a Thursday, and on the following Monday we had literally thousands of people outside City Hall protesting the plan (and this was before the days of the Internet). The mayor wasn’t the kind of person to back down, so the protest turned into a huge citywide effort to prevent him from eliminating DAS. After an unyielding battle, we prevailed, and the City Council later passed Local Law 49, codifying DAS. This prevented Giuliani from eliminating DAS, and made it so that any future mayor who wants to get rid of it will have to get the City Council to repeal the law.

  What I learned from that experience, and from all my time with Tom, was that if you want to get things done—whether it’s finding a way to fix up crappy tenements so people can live with dignity, or getting legislation passed to protect vital city programs—then you’ve got to work hard and be creative. And you have to be willing to work hard in a way that’s relevant to the particular situation. Sometimes that means doing tons of research, sometimes it’s meeting with different people who won’t talk to each other, sometimes it’s participating in activities or organizing events, and sometimes it’s coordinating with other staff or experts or elected officials. Ultimately, the people who succeed in getting the city to be a better place are the ones who are the most focused and work the hardest. It’s a lesson I carry with me every day.

  CHAPTER 8

  Facing Myself

  I came to trust Tom in a way I had never trusted anyone in my life. He was so up-front and open about himself in every way, including the fact that he was a recovering alcoholic. And because he spoke about himself so honestly, he gave the impression that he didn’t judge other people. People would tell him things about their lives that they might not consider telling anyone else. I had felt comfortable enough to tell Tom that I was gay, not that it was a realistic option to hide my relationship with Laura. But now as we started a new stage of working together, I felt the need to tell him my darkest secret.

  One day a few months after the primary, when I was his chief of staff, we were working alone together, and he started talking about bulimia. Maybe he brought it up because he thought I had a problem. But once he opened the door, I decided to step through it and told him something I’d never mentioned to another soul.

  “Oh, I do that,” I said. At that point, I had been making myself sick for ten years, since I was sixteen, when my mother was dying. I would think, I feel bad. I need not to feel bad. Then I would overeat to feel better or less sad. I would think, If I make myself sick, afterward I won’t feel bad for some period of time. That’s what was going on subconsciously.

  But I told myself that I was doing it because I was fat and wanted to lose weight. It was my way to eat and try to lose weight at the same time. When you’re young, you don’t have any sense that you’re trying to get relief from feeling emotionally overwhelmed, or from the fact that your life has become unmanageable (although that’s clearly what I was after). Instead, you tell yourself it’s all about losing weight. No matter how many times I told myself I needed to stop doing it, the brief sense of relief I got afterward would become incentive enough to keep on doing it. The problem was that over time the relief I got became less and less. But by then you really can’t stop—it is such a compulsion. I knew I had a problem because I wanted to stop, but as much as I tried to, I couldn’t. I’d say to myself, Tomorrow I’m not going to, or This week I’m not going to, and then I’d do it again.

  It was disappointing and frustrating, so it was something of a relief to confide in someone I trusted. Tom was kind and supportive, but he was also concerned. He didn’t press me, but in the weeks and months that followed, he encouraged me to seek treatment. He explained that like all addictive diseases, bulimia is progressive. He recommended that I go to an inpatient eating disorder clinic and suggested a place where someone he knew had gone.

  If it had come from anybody else, I would have rejected the idea, but Tom was the right messenger. I didn’t welcome the idea of checking into a clinic, but he helped me recognize that the only way I could get better was to get help, and that the best way to get help was in a clinical setting.

  Tom told everyone at work that I was taking a leave of absence. My girlfriend, Laura, of course knew I was going, and I told a couple of friends. But that was it. Once I was there, I called my sister to tell her where I was and why, and her response was very positive. I never told my father.

  I remember getting off the plane and looking for the person with the sign for the clinic. A couple of other people were getting picked up at the same time, and once we got to the place, we were each taken into a different room to fill out lots of paperwork and answer lots of questions. Then I got my room assignment. We had the rest of the day to settle in, and things didn’t really start until the next morning.

  My first morning didn’t get off to a great start. Because it’s a medical facility and they keep track of your health while you’re in treatment, they draw blood on a regular basis. The first time I just about fainted. Not full-out fainting, but on the way to fainting, which is something that rarely happens to me. I must have been very anxious, and the needle in my arm just pushed me over the edge
.

  Every day in rehab was pretty structured. You got up, you had breakfast, and you had individual therapy, where you had to talk about yourself, or maybe group therapy, where you had to talk about yourself and listen to other people talking about themselves. There might be exercise walks, and there might be journaling. Those of us with eating disorders sat together and ate together, sometimes under the supervision of a staff member. This structure made it possible for us to understand our issues better and break bad patterns. It was a good start.

  We also got an education on nutrition. Having grown up in a home where our meals were determined by the route home from the day’s lessons, I found the new information confusing but critical—and it has been useful ever since. That said, learning about the difference between a carbohydrate and a protein was a breeze compared with the therapy sessions. You had to talk about your life in at least one one-on-one therapy session and in one group session a day. The whole process was incredibly challenging because for the first time I was forced to face elements of myself that I had ignored.

  People came to rehab with all sorts of issues and goals. One enormously overweight woman just wanted to be able to walk on the beach with her grandchildren and to bend down and pick up shells. A very overweight man in his thirties had the kinds of health problems you might expect in someone decades older. An anorexic mom talked a lot about her children, and how she felt bad about what she was putting them through. What struck me about these people was the fact that they just wanted to be able to do the simplest things, walking with a grandchild on the beach or being normal about food at home. Our shared challenges were making our lives complicated and unmanageable. We all yearned for a time when these issues would fade, where something or someone greater than ourselves could help us help ourselves, so we could get on with our lives in the fullest ways possible.

  Everyone talked about trying this and that and the other thing to stop doing whatever it was that had landed them in rehab. Even if their experiences were different from mine, I could identify with the feelings they were going through. It helped that everybody was there for the same basic mission, so the kinship and camaraderie made opening up a little easier.

  I talked a lot about my childhood and my mother and those feelings of responsibility, guilt, and blame. I believed—and I guess I’ll always believe it on some level—that it was my fault she got sick, that it’s my fault she died, that if I had been a better child, if I had been an easier child, she wouldn’t have gotten sick, or the sickness would not have progressed and she would not have died.

  I think when you’re a kid, you need to assign blame to something or someone, because otherwise you’re just living in a universe that’s spinning out of control. Now, all that is intellectually absurd, and even at sixteen you know that that’s not how cancer works. I wasn’t a bad kid, but knowing something rationally and intellectually is different from understanding the implications and impact of those feelings on your life, and when something starts in childhood in a dark and bad time, it can be hard, if not impossible, to break that cycle without help. I came to realize that even though I was in my midtwenties, I was dealing with issues of my childhood.

  It was one of my first significant or big moments of asking for help. It was a shock for me to let go of the idea that “I can do it all, I can fix it—it’s all on me.” This perspective had become part of me growing up, when I was taking care of people. So that message was significant for me to hear and take in.

  Another important thing happened: I realized that it’s okay to not feel good about yourself. It’s not the end of the world, but you have to find ways to cope with that feeling and to let go of it so you don’t internalize it. Because if you’re bulimic or drinking too much, you’re making yourself feel worse. This may seem completely obvious, but sometimes it’s hard to see.

  Probably a third thing was the recognition that when things happen in life, they have an impact. It’s no use pretending they don’t, because they do. They don’t go away so you have to deal with them. I had to learn that confronting them is not an admission of weakness or failure, which is how I’d thought about it before. I wasn’t dealing with it properly. I started to piece it together during that month. Rehab planted seeds in me that then grew later on.

  When I went to rehab, it had a food wing and an alcohol and drug wing. We did some things together and some things separately. The clinic basically said that if you’re in either wing, food or drink, you have an addictive personality, so if you drink, you really should think about stopping. In the time after rehab, I started thinking about how I drank, and that I often drank for the sake of getting drunk. I had thought it was normal, but I came to realize it wasn’t. As the years went by, I started drinking much less, cutting back, watching what I drank, never drinking to get drunk. And then about three years ago, I decided, look, if you’re spending time managing it and thinking so much about controlling it, it’s not a good or healthy thing. So I asked for help, and I got it. Over the last three years I haven’t drank at all. And the truth is, my realizations at the rehab clinic over two decades ago started a process that has now fully come to fruition.

  You would think that given my family history I should have been more aware of my potential for having a drinking problem. My father’s grandfather was a terrible drunk, and consequently my father’s father, Pa Quinn, didn’t drink, and he drilled into my father that drinking was a bad thing. This was a story my father told repeatedly throughout my childhood. So my father didn’t drink, and he was very up-front about it being a practical thing; he had no philosophical or religious reasoning for not drinking or for why he thought it was a bad thing.

  My father’s mother, Nana Quinn, drank too much, too, and so did my mother’s father and one of his brothers, who were always being shipped off to the drunk tank to sober up. My mother drank too much as well, although it was hard to tell if she was on alcohol or the calming-down pills the doctors gave her. But none of that penetrated, and once I started going out to clubs and dances, I’d always drink until I was drunk.

  I did not have any expectations of finding a cure or discovering happiness by going to rehab. I was just looking for freedom from misery. If I could simply feel neutral, that would be achieving a state of bliss. I didn’t have to be happy, just not feel horrible. It was a modest goal, and by the time I went back to work, I didn’t feel horrible, although it would be a long and difficult road before I felt good, even happy.

  But the amazing news is that today I actually know happiness, and know that even in life’s dark moments I can get help. It’s okay to ask for it. Those miracles that my mother and Aunt Julia believed in—if you pray, if you work on yourself, if you know when to pray and when to run—those miracles can and do come true.

  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.