New York City Gay Rights Bill of 1986
[1][2] The purpose of the bill was to provide protections from discrimination to New York City's LGBTQ+ population in three main areas: housing, employment and public accommodations.
It took 15 years before the final version of the bill was passed, and this was due to opposition from many sides such as city council members, religious organizations, and labor unions.
Thomas J. Cuite appointed opponents of gay rights to the General Welfare Committee to prevent the bill from getting a full floor vote in the Council.
[7] Public statements from labor unions and conservative religious organizations helped create and reinforce these popular misconceptions about the bill.
[11] In 1973, another instance of Cuite's opposition reigned, when eight city council members signed a petition introduced by the Gay Activists Alliance to reintroduce the bill.
However, Cuite refused to recognize the petition as proper legislative procedure, and denied the reintroduction of the bill for vote on the main floor of the City Council.
[4] The Gay Activists Alliance was a key organization in both pressuring lawmakers to pass the bill and combating misinformation that was being spread by opponents.
One of the first actions they took to garner support for the bill was through a report entitled “Employment Discrimination Against Homosexuals", which they sent to the NYC Commission on Human Rights in February 1971.
[14] The report, produced by the Fair Employment Committee branch of the Gay Activists Alliance, detailed the instances of personal discrimination of employees in various workplaces; such as the Metropolitan Taxi Bureau, various New York City public schools and even large scale companies such as IBM.
Their goal was to defend and ensure the rights of the gay and lesbian population through “legislative, judicial, administrative and budgetary processes of government" as stated in Article I of their Constitution.
The Holy Name Society, a Catholic group opposing the bill, maintained that existing laws protected gays and lesbians.
There were also several proponents who were Catholic, such as Father Bernárd Lynch, whose lived experiences during The Troubles in Northern Ireland at this time pushed him to advocate for the bill.
In her testimony, she argued that Cardinal John O’Connor and Bishop Mugavero were emblematic of the Roman Catholic Church’s lack of compassion and weak position on civil rights.
From 1983 to 1985, MACT/NY members also worked with the New York City Human Rights Commission to chronicle discrimination against gay and lesbian New Yorkers in the areas of housing, employment, and public accommodations.
They also noted that the respondents who took part in the survey described an environment that cultivated fear, and that came as a result of physical and verbal abuse targeting their sexuality.
An article published by the New York Times in 1986 also documented how violence against the homosexual population across the United States was at a high, compounded by the AIDS epidemic.
[23] At a hearing at the House Judiciary Committee for Criminal Justice, human rights groups presented a series of local, state, and national surveys that documented these cases of violence and their underlying causes.
David M. Wertheimer, the executive director of the New York City Gay and Lesbian Anti-violence Project gave testimony which accounted for 351 anti-LGBTQ+ incidents that ranged from homicides to verbal attacks, within the first nine months of 1986.
Documenting the cases of discrimination and abuse became pivotal to the movement's cause, as it also spread awareness to what was happening in the city to the gay and lesbian population.
[25] Due to what Rivera described as a “backroom deal" in City Hall, lawmakers introduced an amendment excluding the transgender community in an effort to get it passed.
[26] As a result of the amendment, these transgender activists went on to continually push back against the exclusion and discrimination they have experienced from both the homosexual and heterosexual community.
