Presentation to the Membership of the National Federation of Independent Unions at the Founding Convention

Delivered by Nomi Azulay, Coordinator of the NYC Union of Lesbians and Gay Men, August 22, 1981

The NYC Union of Lesbians and Gay Men is an independent union working for representation for gay people on our jobs, in our communities, and in city government. The Union was founded in November, 1979 out of the first campaign of the New Alliance Party in the Bronx. At that time, many gay people from the communities of the South and Central Bronx came out to work for an independent party which spoke out for the rights of all unrepresented people of NYC.

The gays that worked in the campaign knew nothing of the Gay Rights Movement nor of the historical struggles of gay people for visibility and recognition. Along with organizers from the Coalition of Grassroots Women, they decided to begin the building of an independent union for lesbians and gay men all over NYC, working primarily to organize unorganized gay people in alliance with a broad-based movement for social and political change.

Since that time, the Union has made some successful inroads into the gay community and into poor and working-class communities where gays have no organizations to fight for their needs and concerns. To the extent that lay people have been organized in the ‘60s and 70s, it has often been into sectarian groups, isolated from the mainstream of U.S. society. The organizational link with the mainstream has been as a constituency of the Democratic Party, functioning to compete with other minority groups for a piece of the shrinking pie. Working solely within the Democratic Party has led many of the former leaders of the Gay Rights Movement to seek legitimacy by aligning with the most legitimate forces—reform politicians, well-to-do businessmen and landlords who make deals to get legislation passed in their own interests, rather than with the unrepresented majority of people in this city who, when organized, have the real power to make progressive change.

By virtue of its links to the Democratic Party, the Gay Rights Movement and the organized gay community have become traditional institutions, incapable of fighting for anything more than democratic reforms for gay people, and not even capable of winning that.

In NYC, a Gay Rights Bill has been introduced and voted down no less than 8 times in the last 10 years by a Democratic Party-controlled City Council. This bill would ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in employment, housing and public accommodations. But in these times of economic collapse, even the demand for civil rights for gay people doesn't mean much.

What does it mean to ban discrimination in hiring of homosexuals when there are no jobs? Or to secure a non-discriminatory policy by landlords to rent apartments to gay couples when decent apartments are so scarce? The bottom line is that the U.S. economy is currently incapable of accommodating the demands of any special interest group, be it Blacks, gays, welfare recipients or women. So while we continue to fight alongside the Democratic reformers for a Gay Rights Bill, we are also working to build the organizations by which all gay people can have a voice in directing the decisions that affect their lives.

The unorganized gays, the majority of whom live in poor and working-class communities, cannot be reached by the traditional institutions. We estimate that somewhere between 10-15% of the population of NYC is gay, mostly living outside the traditional structures of family, unionized jobs, and certainly not responsive to the empty promises of the Democratic Party. Most gay women and men live inside the closet, in other words, afraid to reveal their sexual preference for fear of public ridicule, anti-gay violence, or the loss of jobs, homes and friends.

This means that in most job situations, a gay person is assumed to be heterosexual. This condition forces gay people into an isolated situation, afraid of opening up about their personal life for fear of “being found out.” On the job, being in the closet puts a homosexual woman or man into a vulnerable position, and prevents the forming of strong close relationships between workers which are such a critical part of the workplace organizing process. The traditional unions and associations have failed to direct themselves openly to the special concerns of lesbians and gay men. We consider that the key to the successful organizing of gays in the community and at the workplace is the open discussion and recognition of these special concerns. We applaud the NFIU for providing the leadership to begin this open discussion.

The NYC Union has worked closely with the New Alliance Party throughout our short history to create a mutually supportive working alliance. We have maintained that NAP's posture as a political party opposed to the oppression of gay people demands an aggressive organizing stance. We work together to express openly the concerns of gay people in NYC in NAP s literature arid public dialogue; such concerns as passage of a Gay Rights Bill, the end of police entrapment of homosexuals, the right to child custody by lesbian mothers or gay fathers, and an end to anti-gay violence. If gay people are to recognize themselves as potential leaders in a movement for social transformation, their demands as a specially oppressed group must be recognized and given public expression.

Our strong and growing relationship with NAP has opened up opportunities for both our organizations to make inroads into the communities of NYC. Many gay people, particularly in the poor communities, will publicly deny their own sexual preference and cannot be organized on the basis of their sexual orientation alone. NAP provides an arena for closeted gays to understand the real nature of gay oppression; i.e., not as a matter of personal identification, but as a restriction on the public expression of those most oppressed to organize in the interests of all unrepresented people. The Alliance provides the context for gay people to accept their illegitimacy, and to use their particular social location to provide leadership to all people working for change.

It would be dishonest to imply that this alliance has not also made us some enemies. The Union is often attacked by gay people for being a paper organization of the NAP, insinuating that we are being manipulated by a predominantly heterosexual organization. And similarly, NAP is often told things like, “I like everything else you are doing, but why do you have to associate yourselves with those perverts. But these kinds of attacks, as we understand them, are basically attacks on our collective politic, which doesn't differentiate gays, Blacks, Hispanics, whites, women or men from the broad base of poor and working people to be organized.

We are seeing these attacks on a larger scale by the growing right-wing forces as the Moral Majority and Right to Life Party. These forces have targeted homosexuals as a force to be reckoned with and eventually exterminated. The Moral Majority puts a lot of effort into spreading lies about gay people and into passing legislation which would prohibit any semblance of civil rights for gays. One far reaching repressive measure, the Family Protection Act illustrates clearly how the legislative attacks against gays are functioning.

The FPA was authored by Paul Laxalt, a Republican congressman from Nevada and a personal friend of Ronald Regan. It was introduced into the House of Representatives in 1979 and reintroduced into the House and Senate on June 17, 1981. The Act specifically attacks women, children and adolescents, unionized workers, Blacks and other national minorities, and lesbians and gay men through a restructuring of some ideological institutions, particularly the schools, health services and legal services. The FPA will probably be debated into the 1982 session of Congress, just as the effects of the current wave of cutbacks on social programs are beginning to be felt in poor and working people's lives, particularly in the public sector where the NFIU organizes.

Among other things, the FPA would prohibit federal funds for any private individual or legal entity “which presents homosexuality, male or female, as an acceptable lifestyle or suggests that it can be an acceptable lifestyle.” The implications of this clause are far reaching. A Welfare recipient could be denied her benefits on the grounds of being a lesbian or for speaking out for gay people. A health care agency could be denied Medicaid reimbursement if they provided services to a gay person. A legal agency would be denied federal funding if it defended a lesbian mother fighting for the custody of her child. Any public agency, such as a daycare center, would be denied funding if it did not discriminate in the hiring of a gay person.

But even in such situation, who is to say whether the person in question is gay or not. Recently, A U.S. Court upheld a landlord's eviction of two women roommates on the grounds that they were lesbians. Such a ruling could be, and probably will be used, to evict any two women, or two men, sharing an apartment; if for instance, the landlord wanted to evict Black people or Hispanic people from an apartment, he would merely have to accuse them of being homosexual. Just as the FPA regulations could be used to deny any public service agency funding by merely accusing that agency of servicing a homosexual. We have seen these kinds of attacks in the 50s, when thousands of progressive people were fired or blacklisted on the charges that they were communists, whether or not they were actually members of the Communist Party at that time.

The Act is viciously anti-Union. It denies federal funds to school districts requiring membership into a Union. It also prohibits federal legal services from conducting training programs or encouraging “labor activities, boycotts, picketing and strikes.”

At a time when poor, working and middle income people, the organized and the unorganized are coming together to build the organizations which can unite us in our common struggle for a decent human society, the right wing is targeting our weakest points of unity. If they succeed in abolishing civil rights for gay people, then we can expect the malicious removal of civil rights for other minorities to follow. If they succeed in busting teachers' unions, we can expect union busting at other workplaces to follow. If they take away the right of poor and working people to organize, then we are going to have a damn hard time fighting a successful battle for survival in the 1980s. At a time when the Moral Majority is trying to divide us along racial and ethnic lines and lines of sexual orientation, we have no choice but to build the concrete alliances to assure that they will be defeated.

It is incumbent upon all progressive people to support and fight for those people, such as gay people, who are at the forefront of the current wave of attacks on our organizing. The only way to counter these attacks is to openly stand in support of lesbians and gay men. This can be done at the workplace by negotiating for a non-discriminatory clause on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring and providing services. It can be done by publicly expressing your opposition to gay oppression in your literature. It can be done by asking a worker whom you think might be gay if they actually are, to open up the opportunity of finding out from that person what forms of special oppression they might be facing at the workplace or in their community.

The NYC Union of Lesbians & Gay Men has some working proposals to present to the NFIU to deepen our organizational relationship. The NYCULGM applauds your work in organizing the unorganized, and congratulate your successful fights for union representation and critical economic demands. You have provided the NYC Union with inspiration and education on the tactical methods of organizing.

We propose the following items to be taken up by the NFIU membership:

(1) Joint work against the Family Protection Act.

(2) The NYC Union can offer Consciousness Raising groups to gay members of your unions to aid your gay rank-and-file in becoming powerful trade union organizers. In our work in building a community union, we have found Consciousness Raising groups to be an essential tool in uncovering the fears that prevent gay people from taking themselves seriously as active movers and changers of social conditions.

(3) We propose mutual strike support between our unions. In the event that the NFIU will be on the picket lines, we could pull out our membership to your aid. As well, the NYCULGM may in the future be calling boycotts or demonstrations that would benefit from your support. Many of the workplaces where gay people predominate, particularly gay owed businesses, are notoriously unorganized. Traditional trade unions have not considered these places a priority. It is possible that we could open up some organizing opportunities for the Federation.

(4) The formation of a liaison body between the NFIU and the NYC Union. We are eager to continue these discussions with you and together develop the ways of raising gay concerns at the workplace and further integrating gay people into the organizing process.