With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir (20 page)

Once I was on the City Council, during the years before I became Speaker, the big push at the city level was for an equal benefits bill, which was modeled after a San Francisco law that required entities that had contracts with the city to provide domestic partnership benefits. The point of that bill—for which I was the lead sponsor—was to get benefits for domestic partners; but even more important, it would demonstrate that we in city government had pushed the envelope as far as we could in recognizing gay families. We did everything to support the bill, from lobbying members of the City Council and community organizing to organizing businesses. The council passed the bill, but Mayor Bloomberg vetoed it. The council overrode the veto. The mayor’s office brought a lawsuit claiming that passage of the bill was a violation of the City Council’s powers, because we don’t have power over contracts, which is actually true. Mayor Bloomberg didn’t disagree with the content of the bill, but he thought the City Council had overstepped its legislative authority. We had tried to be creative about how we wrote the legislation, doing it in a way that threaded the needle, but the court didn’t agree, and we lost. It was a big defeat.

When marriage equality finally became a legislative possibility in New York in 2009, a coalition of statewide gay rights groups led the organizing, with a focus on the state senate. I looked to these organizations to tell me who were the potential or likely yes votes. Sometimes they would reach out to me and tell me who needed to be lobbied, and sometimes we’d go to them and ask, “How can we help? What more do you need from us?” Tons of people worked tirelessly on trying to get the bill passed, but frankly, in retrospect, it was something of a seat-of-the-pants effort, and when the vote came on December 2, 2009, we lost in a landslide—38 to 24. Despite the support of then governor David Paterson, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and the Senate Democratic leadership, all thirty Republican senators voted against the bill, along with eight Democrats. The loss stung, and I took it personally.

At a press conference two days later, I was angry and upset. When the last questioner asked what I thought happened, I said:

I think we lost is what happened. What’s important now is to figure out what we do moving forward. There are lots of factors that we can all hypothesize about. Could all of us have done more? Everyone can always do more. But at the end of the day, people did the wrong thing [by voting against marriage equality]. There may, in fact, be a lot of very abstract, fair political outside factors that made this vote very difficult for people. But I don’t care. You know . . . my father is eighty-three years old. Kim’s father is eighty-three years old. Our mothers died when we were girls, coincidentally. Mine when I was sixteen, Kim’s when she was seventeen. So how a roomful of people who’ve never met me don’t think it’s fair to [increase] the likelihood that her father and my father can see us dance at our wedding . . . Well, I don’t really care about a coup [by conservatives in the state legislature]. I don’t care that people ganged up on Dede Scozzafava, who’s a courageous woman. What I care about is that my life isn’t any better today.

Dede, a Republican state assemblywoman, was stripped of her Republican leadership position for voting in favor of the marriage equality bill.

The next morning Kim and I were having breakfast at Moonstruck, our neighborhood diner, and were both feeling down. One of the waiters, who must have seen a news clip from the press conference, stopped at our table and said, “Don’t worry—your fathers will live to walk you down the aisle.” It was sweet of him to say, but given New York State politics, the chances of a new marriage equality bill coming up for a vote anytime soon—let alone getting approved by the state senate after being defeated by such a large margin—were slim to none. And our fathers weren’t getting any younger.

But it turns out the waiter knew more than I did. Andrew Cuomo, who was elected governor a year later, cared deeply about marriage equality. Early on he said he would define success in his first year by whether he accomplished three things: fixing the state budget, passing new ethics legislation, and signing marriage equality into law. He made clear that he thought New York was losing its identity as the Empire State, in part because it was no longer a leader in human rights.

New York has such a history of human and civil rights leadership. It was a birthplace of the women’s suffrage movement, the women’s rights movement, in 1848, and a major stop on the Underground Railroad. It passed the first equal employment laws in the postwar era. And in 1969 the uprising at Stonewall, right in our city, signaled a new push for gay rights. Governor Cuomo believed that the state legislature’s defeat of marriage equality was a blot on the state’s record. To be seen as a leader again, New York couldn’t leave behind a portion of our citizens.

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his second time around was totally different. After we’d lost the first time, people did a brutal and honest debrief and came up with a much more orderly plan for how to persuade enough senators to vote yes. Governor Cuomo and his people essentially chaired the enterprise, which made the difference. Over the course of the two lobbying campaigns—first in 2009, and then again in 2011, I probably had two dozen or so formal meetings with state senators, mostly in Albany, and in addition I hung around the halls of the state capitol, where people I needed to talk to wandered in and out. I’d wave and maybe walk with them from one part of the capitol to another, maybe follow them until I could get a moment with them. It was like what I did in college, lobbying at the Connecticut state capitol.

The legislators gave me a whole range of responses. Some were pleasant, even if they weren’t going to be with me in the final vote. Others were strikingly personal and serious and deliberate in their thinking. Some were, out of nowhere, oddly honest. Many were appropriately concerned about the impact their vote would have on their district and on their prospects for being reelected.

The vote in Albany was to be held the week of June 20. The timing made my life a little bit complicated, because a month or two earlier our niece Kelley had asked to have her college graduation party at our beach house. I’d suggested Saturday, June 25, the day before the LGBT Pride Parade. After the party, we’d have to head back to the city Saturday night or Sunday morning to march in the parade, but it was no big deal. Kim’s immediate response was “Are you crazy?” She had a point—which I dutifully disregarded.

It was also budget time, and though I believed we would finish negotiating early, there was no guarantee—you never knew what would happen, or when. Kim said we should find another date for the party, but I insisted, “No, the budget is going to be over early. I know it. We’ll be able to run up to Albany to watch the vote, and I’m going to take that Friday off to prepare for the party. We’ll get it all done, and you don’t have to worry. It’ll be fine.”

Those were dangerous words. What I didn’t count on was that the budget negotiations would drag on, in large part because I was determined to avoid laying off four thousand teachers. Still, at the start of the week, I was hopeful that I could wrap up the negotiations in time to go to Albany and then take Friday off. I’d packed a bag and kept it at my office. At the beginning of every budget meeting, I’d ask, “What’s the Albany update?”—some people in those meetings were also monitoring what was going on at the capitol. But by the end of the day on Wednesday, I’d given up hope of seeing the vote. We were still working out the final budget details. Of course everything wound up coming to a head on Friday—the last day possible for both the budget and the Albany vote. The LGBT Pride Parade was Sunday, so if the vote didn’t happen, we were going to have a disaster on our hands.

The budget negotiations were going down to the line. We were in a financial crunch, and the mayor was right that we needed to cut money from the budget. But he proposed that we lay off four thousand teachers, which was not right. I knew it was bad for the city and terrible for our children. The mayor and his people were immovable on the four thousand teachers unless they got some concessions. But I just kept saying to him, “We’re not going to do this.”

And I kept saying to the unions, “I don’t want to do this, but I need help, because I don’t have enough money to prevent this from happening.”

Finally the unions asked, “Well, what do you want us to do?”

I told them the truth. “I don’t have any idea what I want you to do, but you know your contracts better than I do. You don’t like the concessions the mayor’s proposed, so propose your own. Because this is not going to work, I don’t have that much money.”

I said the same thing over and over to everyone: “I need your help. I need your help. I need your help. I need your help.”

Harry Nespoli, the head of the municipal labor committee, came up with a proposal that would have prevented layoffs across the board for all unions; it wasn’t acceptable to the mayor, so we reworked it to another proposal. The majority of the unions rejected that, but in this kind of process, continuing to ask, and refusing to take no for an answer from anybody, can actually work.

Finally, the UFT, the teachers’ union, came up with $80 million worth of concessions. We needed $270 million, but that concession changed the whole dynamic—we were able to get the mayor to help us come up with the rest of the money and save the jobs. I had invoked my old strategy: I wouldn’t stop asking for help, and I wouldn’t give up. I just was not willing to settle for no. And it was funny; it wasn’t until the day when the clock was literally going to run out that we were able to get a deal. That morning I still didn’t know if we were going to be able to get a deal.

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t was a nerve-racking morning. At City Hall, we had the down-to-the-wire budget negotiations with four thousand teachers’ jobs on the line, and in Albany we had marriage equality hanging by a thread. Nothing was working on either issue. I left City Hall and raced across the street to the office building at 250 Broadway. I kept saying to the staff, “Call the union back. Call the mayor’s people back. Make them keep talking. We have to keep talking.” And somehow we just got there. The second we had an agreement, we just said, “Get the councilmembers in here—we’ve got to get this done now.” It wasn’t ultimately a hard sell, but we still had a lot of people to talk to.

In a perfect world, we would have wrapped up the budget deal early enough on Friday to do our ceremonial handshake at City Hall live for the six o’clock news. (In government lingo, the big press conference where you announce you have a budget deal is called the “handshake,” because after you announce the budget deal, the mayor and the Speaker step in front of the podium and shake hands, and the mayor and I kiss. The kissing part is probably a recent addition.) But the deal came together so late that we missed the six o’clock news. So we decided to schedule it for ten p.m. We figured that by then the vote in Albany would have happened.

Kim had gone to the beach house on the Jersey shore, to get ready for the party. Throughout the day I’d kept her posted on what I was hearing from Albany—the senate Republicans had had a marathon nine-hour debate that day just on whether to allow the bill to come to the floor of the full senate. But they finally allowed it.

Toward the end of the day, I told her I thought the vote would come that night and that we were going to win. Her response was a blunt “Yeah, right.”

“No, I mean it,” I said. “It all really comes down to Senator Saland.”

Before the final vote, the senate had to vote on an amendment regarding religious exemptions, and if Senator Stephen Saland voted in favor of it, which seemed likely since he’d crafted the language, the handful of other courageous Republicans who indicated they might (or would) vote in favor of the final bill would likely ultimately do so.

Kim and I were on the phone while we watched that first vote together, and once Senator Saland voted for the amendment, I said, “It’s going to happen now.”

Kim said, “Chris, I’m not going to get excited.”

“It’s going to happen,” I said, because at that point we were so close.

She wasn’t convinced. “I’m not going to believe it until it actually happens.”

After Senator Saland voted, I headed over to the Tweed Courthouse for our budget press conference. Because the big budget issue had been the massive teacher layoffs, and we’d avoided them, we decided to hold the press conference at that courthouse, which is where the Department of Education’s headquarters are located. We knew the final vote on the marriage equality bill in Albany would happen during our handshake, so we set up a system with the mayor’s press secretary to give us the high sign when it passed. We wanted to deliver news of the vote as soon as it came in. The plan was to adjourn the budget press conference, and the mayor and I would each make a statement on marriage equality.

During the press conference, Meghan Linehan, my deputy chief of staff, walked into the room through a side door and jumped up and down with a huge smile on her beaming face.

I touched the mayor on his shoulder. “I think the bill has passed.”

So the mayor said, “We have great news from Albany.”

We wrapped up the budget and moved on to marriage equality. The TV cameras got what I said on tape.

It’s hard to describe the feeling of having the law of your state change to say that what you know in your heart is true, that you are a full member of the state and that your family is as good as any other family. Tomorrow, my family will gather for my niece’s college graduation party and that’ll be a totally different day because we’ll get to talk about when our wedding will be and what it’ll look like and what dress Jordan, our grandniece, will wear as the flower girl. And that’s a moment I really thought would never come.

As much as I said I was sure this bill would pass, I was never sure this bill would pass. And even this morning as I said to my partner while getting ready for the day, I was so nervous because I had begun to plan the wedding in my mind and I thought, What if it doesn’t happen again? The disappointment will be so tremendous. And the feeling now is so overwhelming. To see Senator Saland stand up there and talk about the journey he had gone through to get to this point. To see senators stand up and overcome their fear of what the voters will do to them or they fear the voters will do in the voting booth—it’s an amazing day.