Cambridge Domestic Partnership/ 1976

“CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS--IT'S ALWAYS BEEN A LITTLE QUEER”

Marcia Deihl


Gay Rights Comes of Age, 1992-2000

“The People’s Republic of Cambridge” has long been known for its freewheeling spirit and left-liberal slant. One recent “Cambridge” joke tells of “[a] professional gentleman dining at the Harvest Restaurant in Harvard Square, [who] upon hearing that the hammer-and-sickle flag had been lowered over the Moscow Kremlin for the last time said, ‘Prague, Warsaw, East Berlin, Bucarest, and now Moscow. Well, at least we still hold Havana and Cambridge.’” The city boasts agencies such as a Peace Commission, a Human Rights Commission, and a Women’s Commission. Its collection of street musicians and poets, along with its Harvard and MIT academics, philosophers, and hangers-on, ensures that the public comment portion of the weekly City Council meetings is rarely dull.

Although Cambridge likes to promote the appearance of diversity and inclusion, the wry quote of the above title was taken from a button made by the gay rights group the Cambridge Lavender Alliance (CLA). They thought it was funny, but also a bit too literal. In 1990, when the group first started, Cambridge might well have been “a little queer,” but was it representative of its gay and lesbian citizens? As one CLA member observed, “In this city there is a liberal veneer, but no one is openly gay or lesbian in city government.”

The first chance to crack that veneer and win a substantial material benefit—paid health coverage for the same sex partners of gay city workers—came in September of 1992. After two years of strategizing sessions with gay activists, proposals, Ordinance Committee hearings, and public hearings, Mayor Alice Wolf proposed a Domestic Partnership (DP) Ordinance. This law would give qualifying same sex and unmarried heterosexual couples equity with married couples regarding hospital visitation rights and parental rights in the public schools. Moreover—and this was the material benefit--city employees would receive paid family health coverage and family-related leave time. At the time, only nine other cities in the country had such ordinances, and if Cambridge passed this one, it would be the first city in the Commonwealth to do so.

It was a bold move. Wolf, who had been dubbed an “honorary lesbian” for her previous work on feminist and lesbian issues, had been instrumental in passing the city’s 1984 Human Rights Ordinance, another first in the state. This ordinance laid the groundwork for the language used in her DP proposal. It outlawed discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation” and/or “marital status,” along with race, age, and gender and other potentially discrimination-prone categories. As Mayor, she opened up City Hall on the day of the Gay Pride March in Boston in 1991, starting the annual city-sponsored Gay Pride Brunch. The gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (hereafter called “gay” for the sake of simplicity) community had welcomed all these benefits, but until the DP proposal, such actions were largely symbolic.

Many councilors were wary. Added costs to the city budget were one concern. When city councils set their agendas, money can often be the defining issue. As John W. Kingdon has pointed out, “budgets [can] act as constraints, holding some items low on (or even off) the agenda because the item would cost more than the decision makers are willing to compensate.” Legal issues involving home rule were another potential problem. Under certain “home rule” charters or amendments, cities can take greater leeway in their actions without consulting the state. Since the state had never ruled either for or against same-sex partnership benefits, Cambridge might need coverage under a Home Rule Amendment. And for the four more conservative (“Independent”) members of the nine-member council, it was clearly a moral issue. Councilor Sheila Russell said in a newspaper interview, “I don’t think taxpayers should have to support alternative lifestyles.” Councilors Michael Sullivan and Tim Toomey, like Russell, counted on a largely working class and Catholic voting base. And Councilor Bill Walsh, one of the most outspoken Independents, submitted an amendment offering similar benefits for any family member or members under one roof: mothers, fathers, siblings, grandparents. “Never is it acceptable to claim to cure alleged discrimination against some members of society when the claimed cure imposes absolute discrimination against other members of society,” he wrote in an order. Although some of the liberal (Cambridge Civic Association or “CCA”) councilors agreed to explore such issues, the CLA saw this move as a disingenuous way to turn the proposal into an expensive messy monster which would have to fail.

In the end, the ordinance was passed by a 5-4 margin, a ratio that showed the intensity of feeling on both sides, and on November 16, twenty-eight smiling couples registered at City Hall, paid their $15.00 and got their cards. The next June, the Gay Pride Resolution, read at the third City Hall Gay Pride Brunch, passed with the same 5-4 margin, with all four Independent councilors voting “present.”

Fast forward to August of 2000. At the tenth annual June Gay Pride Brunch, all nine councilors voted in favor of the Gay Pride Resolution. With Cambridge’s local ordinance being challenged by two “big dogs”—the courts and the state legislature—the entire city government, from councilors to professional managers, is staunchly defending its 1992 ordinance. Even Mayor Anthony Gallucio, a young Independent who cast the lone vote against the 1995 Gay Pride Resolution, has become a passionate speaker in defense of his city’s gay citizens.

What happened here? What forces caused the council to sway from weak support to strong support for such a volatile national issue? In this paper I will try to answer that question by proposing that it was due to the growth of the Cambridge Lavender Alliance, of which I was a member. I will show that phase one of this group’s influence was similar to what Browning, Marshall, and Tabb might label a “protest/demand” tactic phase. The CLA got attention by using the press, distributing rabble-rousing flyers within its ranks, and making alliances with sympathetic individuals and groups who were already established in city government. Phase two was an “electoral mobilization” phase, in which the CLA ran candidates from its own ranks. I will show how the group used coalition building, community organizing, and identity politics mobilization of formerly slack resources to consolidate its power, ultimately resulting in longstanding political incorporation in the city. Finally, I will explore other, larger reasons for such a big change of attitude.

DEMAND-PROTEST . . . AND BEYOND: TRIAL BY BUREAUCRACY

As Bachrach and Baratz’s model of the political process asserts, any group in power, whether liberal or conservative, seeks to maintain the status quo. A newer challenging group of any kind must successfully pass through several steps if it wants to win real concessions. First, it must overcome the unquestioned biases in the current governing body’s myths and symbols. Next, it must jump several institutional barriers--procedures, orders, ordinances and hearings. Third, it must win the vote. And last, even if the vote is in its favor, the challenging group must watch closely as the details of fine-tuning, administration, and implementation are worked out.

Although most Cambridge liberals were supportive of gay rights in a vague sort of way, to jump such hurdles would demand lots of time and organization. The CLA successfully negotiated all four hurdles. First, it sent out press releases and enlisted sympathetic local newspaper writers to publicize its existence and its local agenda. The first article introduced the group: “The group wants to run openly gay men, lesbians and bisexuals for City Council and School Committee, set up a drop-in center for gay teen-agers, and work with the police and other city officials to improve the atmosphere for gay people. ‘I think people got tired of going across the river (Boston),’ said Donna Turley, an alliance member. ‘There are a lot of Cambridge issues.’” Photos and personal stories of group members made the group seem a bit less “other” to the heterosexual community. Biases built into any U.S. city will default to heterosexual assumptions until they are questioned by non-heterosexuals. The issue of gay rights, except for the 1984 Human Rights Ordinance, had been a non-issue on the city agenda. Until the DP vote, other laws favoring Cambridge’s gay community were simply not brought up. Until Mayor Wolf introduced it, DP coverage was a “nondecision,” completely off the radar of the other city officials.

The next step was the hardest: simply to wait, quite a challenge for a group of formerly protest-based members. In order to proceed any further, they had to endure committee meetings, closed ordinance meetings, open public hearing, reconsiderations, and all of the mundane and time-consuming business of a municipal government. The CLA, made up primarily of veterans of gay pride marches and AIDS funding actions, was, in the words of Michael Lipsky, a “relatively powerless group” in that it was “lacking in conventional political resources.” Since a domestic partnership ordinance was a new concept, and since such laws had to go through proper channels, the group organized to pass through all the barriers of procedure.
The fact that it did was impressive for two reasons. As Lipsky wrote, "Relatively powerless groups, to be influential, must cross the 'threshold' to engage in politics.” Secondly, a relatively powerless group finds it more difficult to implement new policy than to simply challenge current policy. Since this was a threshold (speakers at public hearings had to literally brave the foreboding City Hall building’s threshold) and a constructive new policy, not just an “anti-” policy, it was a victory for the CLA.

Patience was the first resource that it had to utilize. A protracted series of steps led to the council’s vote on September 14, 1992. On June 22, the City Manager asked for information on the cost. Michael Gardner, the Personnel Director, estimated costs (based on Seattle’s similar ordinance and population) as a wildly ballpark $603,000. There was a committee meeting on June 26, and finally, on July 22, there was a public hearing at which several legal experts, community supporters and CLA members spoke in support of the measure.
Evidence that the CLA was becoming more strategically sharp was evident at this meeting. Mayor Wolf opened the evening, saying that the ordinance was “a matter of family values in the truest sense.” She referred everyone to the draft of the Domestic Partnership Ordinance. The gay community had done its homework and rallied its supporters and allies. Testimony in favor of the ordinance came from the Chair of the Human Rights Commission, the President of the Boston chapter of NOW, several clergy members, two union presidents, several gay parents, and general members of the CLA. Also testifying that July night was Mary Bonato, an attorney for Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD). She offered that the legal issue was whether the city had the right to compensate nontraditional families in a manner equal to its compensation of traditional families of employees, citing several precedents of law. She also said that although home rule legislation was a legitimate option, it was not necessary in this case because Cambridge already had the power to provide these benefits as an employer. No testimony was offered in opposition. A motion to send proposed amendment back to the City Council for action was offered and was carried with a voice vote, with Independent Councilors Sullivan, Toomey, Walsh, and Russell voting present. The second reading was on August 12, followed by another public hearing on the definition of "family," and on August 14, the Ordinance Committee met to discuss it. Finally, on September 14, a vote was taken--five in favor, four against. Councilor Walsh filed for reconsideration, but his motion failed.

Even though they had won the vote, supporters of the DP Ordinance still had to watch the last stage of its implementation carefully. There were details of procedure to work out at local, state, and national levels. At the local level, not all of the city’s unions agreed to honor the additional health coverage. In November of 1993, then-Councilor Katherine Triantafillou (a candidate from the ranks of the CLA) worked with the City Manager and the Personnel Director to enable the city to offer the benefits without the union’s approval. At the state level, there were questions about whether home rule decisions could be applied in terms of legal language (the definition of “spouse” and/or “dependent”) and if the city’s right to provide equal employment benefits for its workers could be applied to gay workers.

There were legal differences of opinion as to whether or not Cambridge could get away with this ordinance. The legal case for the ordinance grew out of Cambridge’s Human Rights Ordinance, which barred discrimination on the basis of, among other things, “sexual orientation” and/or “marital status. City Solicitor Russell Higley noted that in a legal precedent, Bloom v. Worcester, 363 Mass. 136, 155 (1973), “[Preemption of a city’s rules] may be inferred if the Legislature has explicitly limited the manner in which cities and towns may act on that subject. [However], if the state legislative purpose can be achieved in the face of a local ordinance . . . on the same subject, the local ordinance . . . is not inconsistent with the state legislation, unless the Legislature has expressly forbidden the adoption of local ordinances . . . on that subject.” He concluded, “Because, (a) marital status and sexual orientation are today deemed an unlawful basis for differentiating between people in the dispensation of employment benefits, and b) the definition of family appears to be expanding, it is arguable that the same Legislature that enacted G.L.c.32B and G.L.c.151B, ss.3 and 4 could not intend G.L.c.32B to be construed to differentiate on the basis of sexual orientation or marital status. Given the state of the law and the arguments that any challenger to the Domestic Partnership Ordinance could make against it, perhaps a legislative solution should be considered.”

At the federal level, tax specialists noted that spousal equivalents could not qualify for federal exemptions of such benefits, so the extra amount of health coverage that went to the gay workers’ partners had to be taxed.

ELECTORAL MOBILIZATION

Gay/Identity Politics

Sexual orientation status is not exactly like racial minority status, but there are similarities. Both groups are minorities, in both numbers and status. Both groups have been historically discriminated against. And both groups experienced a cultural awakening in the 1960’s and the 1970’s. On the other hand, since a gay identity is not visible, per se, like a black or brown face, it’s easy to “pass” as privileged if you’re white. Although the gay community includes all class and race levels, activists in a city such as Cambridge are most apt to be white, middle class, and educated. However, many gay people don’t want to pass. They feel much happier when they’re not living a secret life, and once they are “out,” they can share a sense of pride and accomplishment with their home community. But of course, some gays are African-American, Latino, and Asian, and they can experience double discrimination. Historically, for the more traditional families of some minority groups, there has often been a moral objection to the idea of same sex couples. Lastly, gay people don’t pass gayness on to their children genetically, like an ethnic cultural heritage, and they don’t usually live in segregated areas (outside of places like Fire Island, San Francisco, and Provincetown).

When Katherine Triantafillou, a lesbian, a feminist, a civil rights activist, and an attorney, decided to run for her first election in 1993, most of her campaign committee consisted of CLA members, of which I was one. That first year, I learned the ropes of leafleting, holding a coffee to raise money, and educating myself about Cambridge’s Byzantine, one-of-a-kind system of proportional representation voting. Simply put, in this system, a quota is established by taking a percentage of the total votes cast. If any candidate gets that number or more, the votes (in order) above the quota are given to that voter’s second choice, and on down the line. As each candidate reaches quota, he or she is eliminated, until all votes are counted. Sometimes it takes eighteen or nineteen “counts” to finish the job.

So I, along with the other campaign committee members, thought of all my friends--from feminists to musicians to co-workers to bisexual and lesbian neighbors--and asked for their individual and allied groups’ support. In this way, I was one of many supporters who were “pyramiding” her base. She addressed all sorts of issues, not just gay or lesbian ones, in her brochure. She took positions which showed both a concern for low-income citizens and an embrace of new immigrants (her father was a Greek immigrant and she forged a strong connection with the city’s Greek community). As a lawyer, she had a sharp eye for the lack of budgetary oversight, and she was highly critical of the City Manager. Different pages addressed issues of Youth and Education, Budget and Finance, Public Safety, Elders, Housing, and Diversity. She appealed in specific ways to several different “reference publics.” Her campaign workers were still surprised when she won, and they celebrated a new era—a community-based lesbian activist had entered city politics. Not only that, she went on to win a second and third election. Speaking of that first victory, Sue Hyde, a CLA leader, told the press, “There are plenty of people who say this organization elected, in significant part, Katherine Triantafillou.”

The December before she won that first election, Mayor Ken Reeves had come out as a gay man at a public dinner in Boston. Putting an end to “the world’s best-known secret,” he remarked, “Alice may be an honorary homosexual, but I am not an honorary homosexual. I am a real homosexual.” This made him the nation’s only “out” gay African-American mayor. He had not come from within the CLA, but he acknowledged that their existence had help pave the way for him. And he added a gay face to the local African-American community, despite his fear of offending his “church ladies.” As it turned out, he had nothing to fear, and he continued to be welcome at his Christian church. Seeing a 20% gay council gave a boost to every gay citizen who watched the locally televised Cambridge Community TV weekly council meetings.
But before they could win political incorporation, Cambridge’s gay and lesbian candidates had to reach out to other groups. A candidate, as a leader, has to manage the four constituencies noted by Lipsky—a base of close supporters, the press, sympathetic groups, and target groups. In this case, the “target” was the entire city of Cambridge, given the “at large” system of voting. Complicating matters was the Proportional Representation System, where voters could pick their number one favorite, number two favorite, and then keep going, if they so wished, through the entire 19 or 20-person candidate’s list in order of preference. Although this system favored minority constituencies, it also pitted similar candidates against each other. As Alice Wolf noted, “In this kind of voting, you often compete with people close to you. You are competing for the same constituency and in a sense, that makes it tougher. . . The test, then, is establishing coalitions with groups other than natural constituencies and having an agenda broader than self-interests. In the past, gays have focused on civil rights and equal protection issues. But raising children—and the myriad of issues associated with that, ranging from custody battles to education—is emerging as a particularly galvanizing issue for both straight and gay communities.” Triantafillou, whose law cases had often dealt with gay parents’ rights, reached out to the lesbian community and her fellow progressive lawyers. Her campaign committee members worked with her to access her probable "reference publics"—tenant’s rights, leftist, and feminist organizations.

CLA and CCA: A Mixed Bag

By 1993, the CLA had the potential to become an independent interest group in the city’s two party (Independents vs. CCA) political scene. Although not every item on its agenda was related to the elections, its political profile was raised when it made its first annual endorsements of candidates for City Council and the School Committee. Questionnaires were mailed to each candidate, and the CLA held public endorsement nights where the candidates came to pitch their platforms. These endorsements put gay issues on the map, and as time went on, candidates from all the different factions attended candidate’s nights and were grilled on their opinions of gays in the military, funding for AIDS research, and ROTC in the public high school. (We gave extra points for using the words “gay” and “lesbian” instead of “diverse” or some such skittish term.) Did the more conservative candidates fear the clout of the CLA? That is highly doubtful, given the city’s proportional representation/at large system. A minority had a chance, but it certainly couldn’t block anyone else’s chance. Most CLA members worked on campaigns for both Triantafillou and Reeves, but they were free to work for any candidate they liked.
The most obvious potential coalition group for Triantafillou was the CCA. As Lipsky noted, “The established civic groups most likely to be concerned with the problems raised by relatively powerless groups are those devoted to service in the public welfare and those ‘liberally’ oriented groups.” As a progressive (pro-rent control, race-and class-conscious) group, the Triantafillou campaign agreed to a Pledge of Mutuality with the CCA, promising to, among other things, “work diligently and consistently with all interested parties to accomplish its Priority Agenda.” In terms of Proportional Representation, the CCA offered this advice: “If challenged on the question of PR, defend it. The best short explanation we know of the purpose of PR is: ‘PR is a fail-safe guarantee that the mix of those elected will reflect the mix of interests and priorities of those voting.’ (And it’s true.)”
Within the four years since the CLA’s appearance on the scene, the “alternative lifestyle” complexion of the city council had changed radically. There were two gay councilors and they had a base of voters which was an additional pool to future candidates. By 1995, Councilors Toomey, Russell and Sullivan all voted in favor of the Gay Pride proclamation. Councilor Anthony Gallucio, however, voted against it. Some of his conservative Christian constituents had objected to a photography exhibit in the schools which showed happy gay and lesbian parents with their children. A new chapter of the Christian Coalition was started in the city that same year. Being more visible often creates a backlash. A few letters to the editor of the Cambridge Chronicle about parental objections to such public school events started appearing. In fact, the battle for gay rights largely moved into the schools in terms of hate speech workshops and curriculum. But in a city with voters registered as 62% Democrat, the CLA was vigilant but not worried.

For a city of nine councilors, a 5-4 vote reveals a controversial issue. For decades, rent control was the fulcrum which tipped right or left, depending on who was voted in that year. Since city council elections were held every two years, any given council could be more liberal or more conservative. But the annual Gay Pride Resolution was an indicator of the city’s consensus on questions of gay rights, and after 1996, there were no objections. Independent members of the council sometimes abstained or were absent, but there were fewer and fewer votes opposed. And, to the delight of his many liberal enemies, Councilor Walsh, one of the most outspoken opponents of rent control and the DP legislation, was convicted of 29 counts of bank fraud and sent to prison in 1996.

Gay Is Not Enough: Pitfalls of Identity Politics

Back in the 1991 election, the CLA refused to endorse City Council candidate Elaine Noble, a well known “out” lesbian and former state representative. Several newspaper writers wondered why a gay group would not endorse this “famous” gay candidate. But the CLA was not just interested in gay and lesbian “identity” politics. “She did not present a compelling case for endorsement,” said Sue Hyde. “She did not demonstrate a high level of knowledge or information or even interest in Cambridge.” The story continued, “When Noble took a verbal swing at the present Cambridge city council in an August 8 interview . . . she upset members of the Lavender Alliance who believe the city council incumbents advocate well on their behalf. . . . Noble said that a June 19 Boston Herald column by Howie Carr was an accurate appraisal of the Cambridge body. Typical of Carr’s gay-baiting rhetoric, the column ridicules Cambridge city council sessions and exploits Mayor Alice Wolf’s title of ‘Honorary Lesbian.’” The headline of the piece suggested that it was a “cat fight”: “Making the Political Fur Fly in Cambridge Election.” But it was more than that. Noble had not mentioned any of the local racial or low income housing issues which the CLA embraced. And knocking their newly approachable city council didn’t help. Noble’s style was the type of “elite minority” politics that Peter Skerry wrote about in Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority. She was more like the Mexican-American politicians in Los Angeles, as opposed to the ones in San Antonio. She was backed by Boston officials like Barney Frank, David Scondras, State Auditor Joe DeNucci and former Mass. Attorney General Frank Belotti, but she had no community base in Cambridge. Her strategy was “reaching out instead of down.” It failed.

The Boston papers always seem to enjoy writing about Cambridge’s squabbles. Another story followed the relationship between Cambridge’s two “out” councilors. “The politics of distinction is palpable these days in City Hall where Triantafillou and Ken Reeves, the city’s first black and openly gay mayor, forge what has been an uneasy professional relationship. That relationship began on a sour note when Reeves trumped the CCA—the party that had endorsed both Reeves and Triantafillou—and gained his second election as mayor by aligning with the Independents, the rival political group,” wrote a Boston Globe reporter in 1994. Reeves was angry at the CCA for its middle class outlook, as evidenced by forcing the largely African-American private Commonwealth School to move out of the city due to “traffic concerns.” Triantafillou, on the other hand, ran on the CCA slate, united by feminist and reform system style “clean government” and non-patronage issues. Class and race politics was always an undercurrent between the two “out” councilors, even though many people considered both of them radicals.

In 1998, there was a rude awakening for Triantafillou about feeling secure in a coalition with a more established group. “In the craziest mayoral election many observers can remember,” wrote a Cambridge Chronicle reporter, “City Councilor Katherine Triantafillou was the first to get five votes Monday night, but Councilor Frank Duehay was elected mayor. The turnaround sparked a wild scene at city hall, complete with screaming matches, accusations of lying and mean-spiritedness, and even a call to the police.” The CCA councilors had changed their votes during the later process, and one by one, they voted for Duehay instead of Triantafillou. The anger of an “oppressed minority” came through loud and clear when one of Triantafillou’s lesbian supporters yelled, “A bunch of straight, white men. I am just so disgusted.” Triantafillou felt betrayed as well by her former allies in the CCA. She had been assured that they would vote for her as mayor. “Minutes before the vote, Councilor Duehay once again assured me that the vote was firm, looked me right in the eye and denied that he and the others were going to switch their votes. I recall commenting that that was good because I had assured all the doubting callers that Councilor Duehay was an honorable man who would stand by his word,” she wrote in a letter to the editor of the Cambridge Chronicle. The following week, a Duehay supporter wrote a letter to the editor saying, “If Triantafillou really had been a loyal CCA councilor, she would have supported City Councilor Frank Duehay for mayor. . . Instead of voting for Duehay, however, Triantafillou unilaterally thrust herself forward and insisted that the CCA councilors vote for her.” Any dreams Triantafillou had entertained of gaining the city’s highest office had failed. She had learned that “the CCA giveth, and the CCA taketh away,” and she no longer valued that former alliance over her independence. After this, she became closer to Reeves, and for the remainder of her council tenure, they made up an unaligned, more race-conscious and leftist gay mini-party within the council, further eroding the old two party slate system.

In 1999, Triantifillou lost her fourth bid for the Council, to the surprise of most observers. Was it the angry outbursts that night from her loyal supporters? Her split from the CCA? Was she “too pushy”—or, as her supporters assumed, too feminist, smart, loud, serious, and lesbian? Did her campaign workers slack off, assuming she would win? No one knows, but Cambridge showed itself once again to be a pluralistic system—unstable and subject to change over time--supporting Robert Dahl’s community power theories.

Not Gay Enough?

Within the CLA, there was another “identity” issue for me. I was often the only bisexual member who came to meetings. For two years, the group voted to keep calling itself a “gay and lesbian” organization, but all that time there was a national push by bisexual organizers to come out as bisexuals within gay groups. We had been there all along—as lesbians and gay men—but many of us had decided that the best “truth in advertising” label was the one which revealed an attraction to both men and women. For feminist bisexuals who once identified as lesbians, there was often a wrinkled nose and a cold stare—we had “sold out to the enemy.” But like the various communities of mixed race people of Asian-American or African-American descent, my identity was fluid, depending on the context. If attacked from without, I would take on a larger, less personal label, one which would increase my larger groups’ political power. But within more friendly territory, if there was no political reason to use a such a general term, I preferred a more particular one. I always supported gay rights, and would happily call myself “gay” if the situation demanded, although I had not been in a relationship with a woman for years. In fact, I was one of the four women pictured above the first article about the CLA, with the headline “Proud to be Gay,” and I didn’t mind at all. Still, I felt second class until 1993, when I was surprised by being given a community recognition award at the annual Gay Pride Brunch. Ironically, the word “bisexual,” which had been discussed but voted down by the CLA that year, mysteriously appeared in the Pride Proclamation. (Some people thought it was a typo, taken from an earlier draft, but there it was. This again showed the importance of following a decision to its implementation!) By the time of Triantafillou’s second campaign in 1995, bisexuals were included in all the CLA literature. Until then, it was considered something the youth went for, like the word “queer,” but for the old guard, it watered down the strength and seriousness of the gay and lesbian movement. Bisexuals usually countered that they weren’t gay bashed on just one side, and that the heroes of New York City’s Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 (in which gay bar patrons resisted arrest and rioted) included a Puerto Rican bisexual crossdresser. It did feel good to be incorporated in the group, and when I told my bisexual friends about my mug, which read “Marcia Deihl, You’ve Always Been A Little Queer,” they responded, “Ah, give her a cheap old mug, she’ll follow you anywhere!” In their eyes, I should have been doing more bisexual politics all along. Bisexuals share these fluctuations of identity and connection with biracial people, but being a “bridge” can be as enriching as it is aggravating. Truth be told, the CLA was more fun than any of the other groups I found. The leftist “Cambridge Rainbow” folks were mostly very serious heterosexual couples. The CCA was much too professional and middle class for my tastes. But the CLA was cutting edge, exciting, and the meetings were funny as hell and full of bad puns. Since I was the only bisexual, I had to earn my way in by working hard, but eventually, I felt like I was home.

Over the course of the ten years, Lavender Alliance weathered internal and external challenges as well, but it is still alive and still part of the political fabric of Cambridge civic life. One early member told a reporter, “I’ve learned more through this than through civics courses. I feel much more connected to the city itself.” The steady presence of the Cambridge Lavender Alliance was probably the main factor having do with changing attitudes towards gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender people in Cambridge. A 1998 photograph taken of the post-brunch crowd on the City Hall steps shows citizens who are secure in their city’s center.



OTHER FACTORS

CLA—Good But Not That Good

Looking back, the CLA’s power was not necessarily indicated by the DP ordinance victory, largely the work of a sympathetic mayor and years of planning by earlier groups. A popular and strong mayor, as well as a long time human rights activist, Alice Wolf was instrumental in jump starting the group’s process. As a "relatively powerless group,” the CLA had to leverage change from protest tactics into a relationship with the city government. For some, simply appearing at a public hearing was a risk, and Wolf remarked that her term in office was immensely gratifying. "I saw some people in tears at the first Gay Pride brunch, not quite believing that City Hall would really welcome them, and I thought, 'Wow--this is really something."

Over the course of ten years, the CLA weathered various phases ranging from euphoria to disillusionment. Identity politics infighting, back room old boy network deals, the fickle system of proportional representation, and shifting waves of general support for the various reform, conservative, and unaligned factions, all affected the its power. A number of CLA members didn’t even want to participate in electoral politics in the first place. They worked on projects like forming of a parent/teacher group (the CLA/PTA), creating a non-discriminatory St. Patrick’s Day Parade (to compete with Boston’s anti-gay one), offering forums like “What’s Left of the Gay Left?” and supporting the gay public high school group, Project 10-East.

Even the material concession of the DP health benefits for city workers’ partners was not a large one. The funds that were actually appropriated were certainly not indicative of great power. Personnel Director Michael Gardner’s initial estimate, using the Seattle rate, was $603,000. In reality, out of a total of 463 Domestic Partner couples registered by 1999 (71 of whom used the health coverage benefit), only $194,452 was spent by the city, a miniscule percentage of its $296,466,580 total budget. (Cambridge used these statistics to bolster its case in court.) But regardless of its material value, the DP ordinance was an important symbolic victory for every gay person in the city. Everyone supported the DP public hearing testimony as an important first action. Not “gay marriage,” not entry into the military--two national agenda items that most leftist gays didn’t even want--it was one issue they could win.

Electoral participation has waned. Although the CLA still endorsed City Hall and School Committee candidates, by Triantafillou’s last campaign there was a noticeable lack of shoe leather on the streets and an increased burst of computerized strategies and big money soliciting for television ads. Campaign workers like me became saddened that even little Cambridge, where you got to know every street and met every "enemy" face-to-face, was becoming more and more like the Big Boys in the federal two party system. And just as City Hall can embrace you as a gay or lesbian or any type of minority person, it can also reject you. Much depends on the shift of which nine people get voted in, and which groups they align themselves with.

National Intercohort Change

A minority population of approximately 10% can not rely on brute force or monetary power. They may simply have to prove by example that they are “just like everyone else,” and deserving of justice. The City Council’s change in support of Cambridge’s gay rights may well have been due to face-to-face interactions with gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people--week after week on the council and year after year at candidates’ nights and brunches. Of course gays had been in the city’s factions and agencies all along—they just may not have been “out.” Increasingly, the gay community was visible, from the individuals in city hall to the increasing numbers of people who showed up, children in tow, at the June brunch. More constituents of all nine candidates had probably worked with an “out” gay person on the Peace Commission, the Women’s Commission, a tenants’ group, or a joint leafleting drive with another campaign.

Over the last ten years, national tolerance for nontraditional families has increased greatly. Part of this is the change in the typical “Ozzie and Harriet” family configuration overall. According to U.S. Census data, of 91.1 million families surveyed in 1988, only 27% fit the traditional definition of two married, opposite sex parents living with their children. Supporting these statistics, Robert Putnam claims that such family units were sliced by more than a third, “from 40 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 1997.” Another change is generational, or “intercohort.” “In 1973 nearly half of all American (45 percent) favored banning from the local public library books that advocated homosexuality, but twenty-five years later that figure had fallen to 26%. Between 1987 and 1999 the fraction of Americans who favored firing homosexual teachers fell from more than half to less than one in three.”

Alice Wolf agrees that time alone may account for more of the change than the need for more gay votes by Independents. “What was it Sheila Russell said when we added ‘transgender,’ as well as ‘bisexual’ to the Human Rights Ordinance? Something like, ‘Oh, you know Cambridge, we have everything.’ What a change since 1992!” Sue Hyde noted the process by which her own mother eventually came around. Dismayed when Sue pronounced herself a lesbian at age nineteen, her mother said on her death bed nine years later that she wished Sue and her partner a long and happy relationship and a good life together. “I think [my mother’s] transformation was made possible by [our] being a part of her life in a consistent way without engaging her in some kind of debate about the goodness of gayness. We were just there all the time. We went to her house every holiday. . . And I think that my mother, like many people, came to respect our relationship. By respecting our relationship, she came to respect our individual identities because we would not hang our heads and act our of fear and shame.”

Circle the Wagons, Lizzie!

A third reason for the turnaround is fierce loyalty on the part of all Cambridge’s diverse communities when they’re attacked from the outside. When their city is used as a punching bag by Boston’s conservative columnists, even Independents are proud of their “People’s Republic.”

The legality of Cambridge’s Domestic Partnership Ordinance hangs in the balance today. Literature on the uses of home rule addresses the fact that the more powerful entity will usually prevail in federal, state, and city governance. But as Bernard H. Ross and Myron A. Levine note, even though states reign supreme, some local government autonomy has always prevailed under home rule, partly because if local governments don’t solve ongoing problems, state legislatures will have to. In March, a court case filed by the Catholic Action League and the American Center for Law and Justice challenged an executive order implementing DP in Boston. When they won their case, the Supreme Judicial Court struck down all other existing DP orders, saying that they violated the state’s definition of “dependent.” They recommended that it was time for the state legislature to rule one way or the other. Therefore, no city could legally continue to offer such benefits, although by this time, Brookline, Northampton, and Springfield had also enacted such laws. Cambridge continued to offer its DP benefits, and its defiance was rewarded with another lawsuit by the same two groups. City Solicitor Higby’s statement of eight years earlier had come to pass: the legislature was charged with deciding the fate of all the state’s DP rulings. But they didn’t, at least this year.

Although Alice Wolf, now a State Representative, and her allies worked on a similar DP bill to Cambridge’s, and although it passed the Senate twice, the House of Representatives balked. The bill died at the end of the legislative session without a vote. It was not an easy sell, given that the state as a whole is much more conservative than the city of Cambridge. While following these cases and votes, the nine Cambridge councilors must have felt like they’d “been there, done that” in terms of their earlier moral objections, and their defense of their city is probably like that of a typical family: big brother can pick on little brother, but if someone outside the family picks on little brother, they’re in real trouble.

CONCLUSION

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender citizens of Cambridge went from being politically untried and merely tolerated in 1992 to being fully incorporated in their city government by 2000. Some of this change is due to national trends in the acceptance of homosexuality overall, and part of it reflects a fierce hometown loyalty because Cambridge’s gay-supportive Domestic Partnership Ordinance is under fire at the court and state legislative level. But electing gay officials was crucial to this change. Having visibly gay and lesbian councilors helped, but mere representation was no substitute for the daily grind of learning the ropes of Cambridge’s electoral system, with its Proportional Representation balloting and its reform “strong manager/weak mayor” nine councilor form of government. By sustaining a membership base who lived in the neighborhoods, used city offices, and voted year after year, and by nurturing coalitions with all of the many other leftist/liberal city groups, the Cambridge Lavender Alliance was instrumental in gaining power and influence for the city’s gay citizens. In the last ten years, a gay mayor and a lesbian councilor were watched (and applauded or decried) by the whole city. Today, gays hold a strong, but probably not equal, place in the cohesive liberal dominant coalition. Although alliances have shifted, both between the gay community and its allies, and among the gay officials themselves, a supportive majority coalition has held over time. This ensures that the weekly council agenda often contains an item or two about AIDS funding, gay history programs in the schools, or outreach to gays for city jobs and police advisory boards. Attitudes about gay people and gay rights have changed considerably in eight years. This has been both cause and effect of what Browning would call “very strong” political incorporation.

MAKING AN EXAMPLE OF MYSELF

Although Cambridge has a population of 95,000, to me it feels like a small town. According to the city’s web site, it is the picture of diversity, with children from 82 different countries attending the public schools. Of the entire population, a little less than half (43,440 people) are registered to vote, and they identify as 62.7% Democrat, 6.7% Republican, and 30.6% “other” or “unenrolled.” Only seven miles across, the city has definite boundaries. As a non-car owner, I am comfortable riding my bike quickly from east to west or north to south. In fact, my “triangle” of work-home-shopping is about a ten minute bike ride from one to another.

Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone made me even more grateful for the small town feeling of such a culturally cosmopolitan city. Because of my last ten years of activism, my city councilors know my face, and my landlord’s daughter-in-law, who is also the City Council Secretary, helped me get back my stolen bike tire from the kid next door without police intervention. When Katherine ran for her first election, I could gather a group of old feminist and leftist cronies from a radius of two miles for a fundraising coffee and, as a renter, help her with low-income housing policy. When the CLA focused on securing votes in favor of DP at the state level six years later, I called my friends Helen and Judy (a lesbian couple I knew through neighborhood women’s potlucks) to lean on Tim Toomey, my State Representative as well as a longtime City Councilor. I knew he had voted in favor of recent Gay Pride Proclamations, and Helen and Judy had worked hard with him to prevent railroad noise in East Cambridge. He supported us.

I can’t be the only one who was affected by getting involved in my own city and feeling some gratifying personal results. There must be many others besides me who now feel incorporated into the city and hence are less strident, much like the Mexican community in San Antonio as written about by Skerry--less shrill, more secure, more rooted, and more assured of getting respect. But the CLA suffers from the same problems that Putnam outlines. The early CLA had a mailing list of 75 and 30 people showed up for the meetings. Today its mailing list contains over 800 addresses--many of whom are couples--but only 8 to10 people usually turn out for a monthly meeting. These figures show both the waning civic participation noted by Robert Putnam and the rhythms of “slack” in the use of potential political power noted by Robert Dahl. Apparently, many of the old CLA members are letting their leaders (“Homo politicus”) have direct influence while they lapse into “Homo civicus,” using their indirect influence by simply voting in local elections.

But I am one of the eight to ten people who show up for CLA meetings. I took some “slack” time during the decade of the 1980’s when I rested from spending the 1970’s being an activist and playing music in a socialist/feminist string band. When I moved back to Cambridge in 1989, I wanted to get involved in politics again. Unlike the suburbanites in Putnam’s book, I do go out to face-to-face meetings, I do feel involved in my block and in my city. And as Putnam notes, such social interactions can yield more than emotional benefits. I found my Cambridge apartment of twelve years through the “old girl network” of feminist friends from the 1970’s. While searching through the city archives, I found my first floor neighbor listed as a member of the early Domestic Partnership Task Force. An official of my workplace union testified at the original DP public hearing. (The archives themselves were rather endearing to this semi-Luddite. Since city records were not computerized until 1995, each ordinance’s file was a huge roll of paperwork, much like a roll of paper towels, secured by a rubber band. I had to mash the pages down with books in order to uncurl them as I sifted through the accounts of the early DP hearings.) I attend Old Cambridge Baptist Church because I liked its liberal gay minister, Irv Cummings, whom I met when he was honored with a CLA Gay Pride Brunch community award. When I was invited to the Marriott Hotel for Katherine’s first council inauguration reception, our committee made up the rowdiest table, but I couldn’t help feeling impressed by being included in such a fancy event.

Of course, I am only one person. But if I got involved in the city thanks to gay politics, I’m sure others did too. There was a base of new people like me over the past decade, learning ward and precinct lingo and the name of every street in town. And to actually win elections, given our status and population minority numbers, made me feel like reciprocating, not just grouching about “politics as usual.” Heck, it made me a good citizen, one who reads the newspapers before my votes, watches the city council on cable TV, and feels comfortable calling up my city and state officials.

Katherine’s three city council campaigns educated me about Cambridge politics and changed me from a “homo [sic] protestus” to a “homo civicus.” By enabling me to move politically from a solely “protest” person to a “politically incorporated” person over the last eight years, my participation in the CLA and in the council campaigns moved me at the personal level as well.

I became, in the end, more “empowered”—to use an overdone but still apt word. As we early women’s liberationists used to say, “The personal is the political.” Conversely, in this case, “the political was the personal.” Today, post-rent control Cambridge offers $1200-per-month studio apartments and a speedy computerized vote counting program for the Proportional Representation system, not the cadre of “blue-haired ladies” who hand counted ballots at the Longfellow School for three or four days running. Computers now count the votes, flopping number one votes for candidates who have met their percentage-of-total quote to the number two candidates, finishing in a fraction of the hand count’s time. But what has been lost? Social capital, that’s what--one place where all types, friends and enemies, saw each other face to face in a common endeavor. Tolerance (at the least) was nurtured. Cambridge is becoming a richer, whiter, more fast-paced city, but for the last decade, I have known the precious neighborhood feeling gained by long term participation in the city’s political center. I, for one, do not “bowl alone.”



Marcia Deihl
August 2000













































BIBLIOGRAPHY


Peter Bachrach and Morton Baratz, Power and Poverty (Oxford University Press, 1970).

Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics (Harvard University Press, 1963).

Rufus P.Browning, Dale Rogers Marshall, and David H. Tabb, Racial Politics in American Cities (Longman, 1990).

Cambridge City Public Records (various), Domestic Partnership Ordinance Records, 1992.

John Carlucci, “GOP Alliance Gaining Ground In ‘People’s Republic of Cambridge’?, Cambridge Chronicle, November 22, 1995.

Gary S. Chafetz, “Cambridge Ordinance Extends Benefits to City Workers’ Partners,” Boston Sunday Glove, October 11, 1992.

Robert Dahl, Who Governs? (Yale University Press, 1961).

Steven P. Erie, Rainbow’s End: Irish-Americans and the Dilemmas of urban Machine Politics, 1840-1985 (University of California Press, 1988).

Scott Giordano, “Still Fighting the Good Fight After All These Years,” Bay Windows, June 10, 1999.

Amy Graves, “Making the Political Fur Fly in Cambridge Election,” Bay Window, October 31-November 6, 1991

_______ “Domestic Partners Register in Cambridge," Bay Windows, November 19, 1992.

Sue Hyde, telephone interview of August 2, 2000.

John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies (Little, Brown and Co., 1984).

Jeremiah Liebowitz, “Duehay Wins Mayor’s Job,” Cambridge Chronicle, January 29, 1998.

Michael Lipsky, "Protest as a Political Resource," American Political Science
Review (December 1968).

Ken Maguire, “Attorney Moves to Have Walsh Serve Prison Sentence in Halfway House, Cambridge Chronicle, February 15, 1996.

Howard Manley, “Visible, Voluble, Out of the Closet,” Boston Sunday Globe, July 24, 1994.

Amy Miller, “Mayor Reeves Reveals He’s Gay,” Cambridge Chronicle, December 10, 1992.

Bill Premo, “Proud to Be Gay: New Group Wants To Become a Force in Cambridge,” The Cambridge Tab, May 29, 1991.

Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community (Simon & Schuster, 2000).

Bernard H. Ross and Myron A. Levine, Urban Politics: Power in Metropolitan America, 5th Edition, (F. E. Peackcock, 1998).

Peter Skerry, Mexican Americans: The Ambivalent Minority (Harvard University Press, 1993).

Brad Skillman, “A Family Matter,” The Chambridge Tab, June 9, 1992.

Alexander Von Hoffman, Letter to The Cambridge Chronicle, February 5, 1998.

Alice Wolf, telephone interview of July 27, 2000.




“Life is a cafeteria line of experience. Attaching any significance to one event over another is simply a human fiction. Any cat knows this. Humans will rationalize any idiotic act; this is the underbelly of our great cognitive tool.”

She wrote this sentence in her diary at age twenty-six. She re-read it, quite pleased with herself. After all, it was true. So far.


Years later she would laugh at this analysis. Only a naïve young woman could have written such an adolescent defense. For each decision has a different effect on one's future. 1976 bared some of the consequences which had been hidden in 1973’s decisions.


After all, that sign that this guy “Kendall” had posted led to her women's band, The New Harmony Sisterhood, which led to women as lovers, which led to her first glimpses of self care. One new layer led to another. Was it just a means to the final end? What end? Self-knowledge? And when she got there, that end became another means. At twenty six, she thought there was an end, a place where she could rest and know who she was. There was, in a way, but that end was a process, not a resting spot. She knew who she was now, but “who she was” was always going to grow. It was just fine tuning instead of gross tuning, like with the harpsichord.

Each choice gets decided by emotion, reason, or a combination of the two. It's almost irrelevant which one predominates, for we always get something we didn't count on, both pleasant and awful. The best choices, "best" meaning creating a more healthy, integrated, happy future usually combine both rational and irrational reasons, but in the end, a complete rational choice can end in disaster (D#2) and a completely irrational choice can be lots of fun (my VW bug).


She wasn’t sure which paradigm to adopt. On any given day, her life might look like a great success or an utter failure. There could be three realities:

You get what you settle for.
You get what you deserve.
You get what you get.







THEMES

1976 + Writers in my family, Edna, Dad, me, Brian. The star gene and trouble too. Wanting to make something fine, write better than the Bible, destined. Dad quote.

1976 = wrong: cafeteria line of life, making a living at music (shock of housing prices now), This is IT!, doormat, oblivious (P.), friends and lovers mixed up somewhat.

LOVE: Why dumped? C. & B,? Negative, sarcasm at first, but nothing under it. Stabs in the dark at relaxation techniques, sex as anticipation mostly.
Characters: R, A, C, B, Ch.

JOB: HCHP, not BC. Steady pay, weight strategy, union. Split, agony.
Characters: T, K, L

MUSIC: book, record. Didn’t think we were good. Now I do. Misunderstood our small pond. Characters. NHSB, Maurice, et al.

Spiritual search: wanted desperately not to care. Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ les to lose (see Rumi).

Right: Two Strand River. From age 10. Political struggles, monk/punk, practicing, kindness, women and men both exciting for different reasons. Secrecy, queerness, outsider view. Fat girls & drag queens. Feminist hated drag queens but I didn’t. Year before, grey rabbit. We always rationalize our libido.

HOW RELATED TO EDNA’s: Topics, she defaulted to children when she accepted her marriage and her lot. Damage to grown sons, objectify them as children and good little Christians and then out like a light. (To the Lighthouse).

FAMILY LOYALTY: Finally I see why I was upset about dad’s body donation. I figured out why I’m different from Dave and Ma. I feel an animal connection, spiritual, history, invisible, illogical, that because he’s mine, he’s special and important. Was brought up to be “fact” based and logical, and I never cheered for our side on the team unless I thought we “deserved it.” Had to earn respect, we all said in the 1970s of our parents. But there’s a different awareness, my cat is beautiful because she’s my cat. Not statistics, polls, outside based. Real, not from intellect. That’s why I was upset by his giving his body “to science”; I got this sense and others didn’t. Not breast fed, all was intellectual love from ma. Not nurturer. Why not? Nana was.



Secrecy and Bruises: How did I get there? Loved drama. Little self protection. Fed up with crunchy feminism.

Music people, picked because I was shy in college, harpsichord NOT, grad school, Rounder.

Day Job: Union at work.

Housing: Adelaide Road, still there, porch, piano. Describe. Search for relaxation, no mention of Priscilla, except when she was mad. Invited to leave. Bro loved naked photos.


My Car. Window of mobility, fluke, $500, clueless. Bike next 25 yrs.

Jan: , Dec., Ch. Crushes. Little did I know, P coming, investment co. (next chapter)

"Singers! Tired of sexist, racist music on the radio? Join us at the Redbook Store, Cambridge, Mass."

This little sign launched a saga of music, women, and politics that would change her forever. She entered 1973 a virgin, a lapsed Phi Beta Kappa music history graduate, an out-of-focus young woman who spent her days battling thoughts of the boxes of sugared cereal in the pantry.

It didn't help that in the apartment with the Davids, the cereal was right next to the phone and the ancient salvaged armchair, the most comfortable one in the apartment. This was the apartment of the Summer of Watergate. Also a baseball game, which She knew from the fact that the television set was never off and the Davids and Bud walked around shirtless and hairy, smoking ciggies and cigars and drinking endless beers, talking baseball and revolution.

She had Tai Kwon Do on Monday nights, Women's Issue Group of Science for the People on Tuesdays, Food coop meetings on Sundays, and since she was getting unemployment, she spent her days at the public library looking up old folk songs and what they said about women. She had just signed up for a graduate degree at a radical school called Cambridge Goddard. Its "campus" was a brick building near Porter Square, one room for files, one room for childcare, another room for Community Meeting, where the womyn yelled at the Marxists and She cowered in the middle. As usual.

S.H., a former Abbie wife, taught a course called "Let the Children in on the Revolution." She lectured that she was an "oddist," yes, spelled that way and that we were all oddists or could be. M.L., of Rounder Records, taught about Dolly Parton as a sub rosa feminist, entirely aware of her image and how to use it to her advantage. M.L. and ____ were starting an affair, but M also had her male lovers too. She wore a black cape and her witchy green eyes never betrayed any shyness. Our heroine idolized and hated her, and when B. asked our heroine to move in to Rounder house, she didn't know which one on whom to have her main crush, M. or B. To be or to have? Girls or boys? Question authority, even gender authority. But where did that leave you? Especially when you woke in the morning to a note from B.: "Make yourself at home." the night before he had said, "Having sex should be like shaking hands," deflowered her, and got up early to write anarchist articles for Black Rose.

The Kendall who had put up the sign was a girl. The group at the Redbook met in the basement, hence the eventual moniker of The Red Basement Singers. She spent the autumn learning words in the unemployment line. "The Cutty Wren" was an old English worker's ballad that spoke of boiling up the landlord for dinner. They sang revolutionary Greek, South American, and North Vietnamese songs for anyone who would listen. "Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh" wowed them at anti-war rallies. The group had the usual fights about elitism and hierarchy (should someone who couldn't carry a tune be allowed to take a solo? Of course! This was people's music!) and where to perform.