R.I.P. Mario Cuomo

"Vote for Cuomo, not the homo!"

Posters bearing that message lined Queens Boulevard in the days leading up to the 1977 primary to determine the Democratic Party's candidate in that year's election for the mayor of New York City.  

Just about anyone who witnessed that campaign will tell you it was one of the ugliest in his or her memory.  I would concur with them:  That message, believe it or not, wasn't even the meanest or nastiest thing one candidate said about another in that race.

But it was almost certainly one of the sleaziest.  Cuomo--Mario, the father of current New York State governor Andrew--always denied that neither he nor any of his staffers had anything to do with creating or posting that message.  I believe him.  So do most other people, even those who were against everything he stood for, or who simply disliked him.  There was no shortage of either of those kinds of people.

Among them was Ed Koch, who won that primary and the election.  Until the day he died nearly two years ago, he insisted that Mario was responsible but later would say that he "forgave" but "didn't forget."

Rumors about Koch's non-heterosexuality followed him throughout his life.  Even in 1977, in the pre-AIDS flowering of the Gay Liberation movement, such an allegation could have derailed his road to Gracie Mansion; any evidence that it was true would have blocked it altogether.  Even in New York City, there were--and still are--homophobes.  

Now, I just happen to be one of those people who believe that Koch was gay but have never cared about it.  I had other reasons for disliking him and his style of governance, none of which had to do with his actual or perceived proclivities or lifestyle.

The irony is, of course, that Mario Cuomo would have been one of the last people to use a charge of homosexuality against Koch, or anyone else.  If anything, Mario was more unabashedly an ally of LGBT people than his son is.  The reason why same-sex marriage and other LGBT-friendly legislation passed under the younger Cuomo's residence in the Governor's Mansion is that the political and social climate has allowed for it.  

Andrew was elected Governor of New York State in 2010, in the middle of Barack Obama's first term as President.  His father, in contrast, earned his first of three gubernatorial election victories in 1982, just when the effects of Ronald Reagan's alliance with Christian fundamentalists--and his profoundly anti-labor (remember: he fired all of the nation's air traffic controllers when they went on strike the previous year) policies--were re-shaping this country's discourse and governance.  Mario's three terms in Albany coincided with the Presidencies of Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well as the first two years of Bill Clinton's.  While the latter was nominally a Democrat, he won the 1992 Presidential election by co-opting the policies of Reagan and Bush the Elder.  Mario, on the other hand, stuck to his New Deal Democrat ideals--which, he always said, were an outgrowth of his Christian faith.  

In other words, Andrew has been surfing the tide of history that his father had to swim against.  But, to be fair, it must be said that it wasn't his championing of LGBT rights that cost Mario a fourth term as governor in 1994.  Rather, it was another of his core principles--one that, by the way, caused me to vote for him:  his staunch opposition to capital punishment.  Every year that he was Governor, the State legislature introduced a bill to restore the death penalty in the Empire State.  Every year that he was governor, he vetoed it.  One of the first things his successor, Republican George Pataki, did upon assuming office in 1995 was to sign it.

I think that his steadfast commitment to his principles may have been a major reason why he chose not to run for President, even though his party practically begged him to do so in 1988 and 1992.  If that's the case, his instincts were canny:  Clinton, who stood against much of what Mario believed in, won. 

(Actually, many would argue that Clinton won by not standing for anything at all--and with perhaps-inadvertent help from third-party candidate Ross Perot.  I would not dispute such an argument.)

So, in brief, with Mario Cuomo's death yesterday, this state--and nation--lost who may have been the last true liberal and the last true intellectual, as well as one of the few politicians with any real principles, this country has ever had.  And, oh yes, a champion of LGBT rights before it was fashionable. 

Upon This Rock Was The Movement Founded

Although people became ill and died from it long before then, the first documented cases of what would come to be known as HIV/AIDS were reported on 5 June 1981.

For the next four years, the mushrooming epidemic was depicted as a consequence of the libertine lifestyles of gay men and the poor choice others made to use intravenous drugs.  Anyone who contracted the disease was thus tarred with the most negative stereotypes about one or the other; family, friends, colleagues and others often abandoned those who were wasting away and dying from the ravages of the disease.

It was a time when many--including then-President Ronald Reagan--would not speak of AIDS, at least not publicly.  To do so, at a time when the so-called Moral Majority was at the peak of its influence, would be to identify one's self with immorality, degradation and sloth.

Then, on this date in 1985, something happened that began the change in public perception about AIDS and its victims.

If you are around my age, you remember it well:  It was announced that iconic actor Rock Hudson was suffering from the disease.

Earlier in the summer, rumors about his health began to circulate when he looked gaunt and pale--almost unrecognizable--during an appearance to promote a new cable series of his longtime friend and former co-star Doris Day.

He was diagnosed with the disease after collapsing in Paris in early July.  There, he was able to receive treatment with HPA-23, a drug that wasn't available in the US at the time.  The announcement that he indeed had AIDS came while he was in the hospital.

Rock Hudson changed the "face" of the disease, not only because he was so famous, but also because, until then, very few people knew that he was gay. Ironically, his character "feigned" gayness to get the character played by Doris Day in Pillow Talk:

 


He died on 2 October 1985, less than three months after his announcement.  In that short time, he started the Rock Hudson AIDS foundation.  He was also credited with jumpstarting Elizabeth Taylor's then-nascent fundraising crusade to fight the disease.

Most important of all, his illness and death inspired, in some people, a willingness to be associated with AIDS victims, which probably did more than anything to bring the fight against the disease into the mainstream of society.

Reagan, Wall Street And The Lost Generation of Transgender People

In previous posts, I've talked a bit about the Lost Generation of Transgender People.  I've mentioned a few of the possible reasons why, it seems, trans people you meet transitioned before the early 1980's or from the mid-90's or so onward.  

Among the things I mentioned were some of the ways in which LGBT-related movements were taken over by relatively affluent gay white men, and the influence of the so-called Second Wave Feminists.  There are, of course, many other factors, which I hope to discuss in this blog and in other fora.  In this post, I'll talk briefly about something that happened in the culture and economy of this country (and, in particular, New York City) that caused us to "lose" a generation.

Perhaps the recent death of Larry Hagman got met to thinking about the things I'm going to say.  (I don't mean to imply that he was a reason why the state of transgender people was worse in 1990 than it was fifteen or twenty years earlier!)  He, of course, was a star on the wildly popular TV series Dallas --which, for many people, epitomized the Eighties, a.k.a., the Reagan Era.

Now, of course, Reagan himself was certainly of no help to our cause.  For all of his first term, and the first half of his second, he wouldn't even say "AIDS" in public.  And he espoused a conservative right-wing "fundamentalist" policy that was, essentially, a code for racism, sexism and homophobia.  The latter, of course, included transphobia by implication because, to the extent that most people thought about it, we were just more extreme versions of gay people.

But what I've yet to hear is the ways in which the so-called economic "boom"--which was concentrated mainly in the FIRE industries--left transgender people even further from economic, as well as legal and social, equality than they were two decades earlier.  

One obvious reason why Reagan's economic policies were disastrous for trans people is that it all but eliminated the few services that were available to us. Believe it or not, some people diagnosed as transgender actually had surgeries for which the government paid during the 1960's and 1970's.  And folks like Sylvia Rivera found more of other kinds of assistance available to them in the years immediately after Stonewall than they would a decade later.

But there was something else in the zeitgeist of the 1980's that made American society--not to mention the country's legal and economic systems--noticeably more hostile to trans people (male-to-females in particular) than it was only a decade earlier.

From the end of World War II until the election of Reagan, Wall Street and its related industries were largely "gentlemen's" clubs.  Most of the men in charge, if not the floor traders, came from the same schools and, sometimes, families.  They were interested mainly in protecting the wealth they had and living off the interest; they tended toward safe, conservative investments and strategies.  Their demeanor and attire reflected their origins in the (mostly) East Coast elite classes.  As one old Wall Streeter told me some years ago, while there was a kind of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, the fact that Wall Street had its fair share of gay men was an open secret.  In such an atmosphere, this man explained, gay men could fit in simply by dressing well and maintaining an air of detachment, if not indifference.

All of that changed during the "go-go" years of the Reagan administration.  Deregulation of the FIRE industries (begun, ironically, under Jimmy Carter, Reagan's predecessor) led to more aggressive behavior in the boardrooms as well as on the trading floor.  Even the few women who were working on "the Street" engaged in hypermasculine behaviors that included excessive drinking and cocaine usage.  In such a milieu, not surprisingly, one could be more openly homphobic or transphobic than his father could have been.  

The "Greed Is Good" era disdained any sort of empathy for--let alone willingness to help--people who are subjected to bigotry and, too often, fall victim to violence for no other reason than their own identities.  People who were poor or otherwise disenfranchised were seen as somehow morally defective.  Transgender people, who were already at or near the bottom of the socio-economic ladder when the era began, lost even more ground during that time.   The ones who weren't destroyed outright were turned into shadows wandering through clubs and alleyways in parts of New York and other cities where neon and strobe lights masked how sad and dirty most of them actually were in daylight.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, too many young trans people didn't survive those years.  And the atmosphere of the era deterred many of us from coming out and transitioning until much later in our lives, if we did those things at all.