David Dinkins, Early Queer Rights Champ, Dies at 93
Recognized same-sex couples, promoted AIDS education, stood bravely with Irish gays
BY ANDY HUMM
David Dinkins, who died
at 93 on November 23,
became mayor of New
York in 1990 — a progay
Black man riding the desperate
hopes of communities of color
and LGBTQ people at a time of
racial unrest in the depths of the
AIDS pandemic.
As mayor, Dinkins advanced the
rights of people in same-sex relationships,
greatly enhanced AIDS
services and education, and stood
with the LGBTQ community in an
epic confl ict over the exclusion of
the Irish Lesbian and Gay Organization
from the St. Patrick’s Day
Parade.
All Dinkins ever seemed to want
to be was Manhattan Borough
president, an offi ce the former city
clerk and Harlem state assemblymember
won in 1985 on his
third try.
But in 1989, after 12 years of racial
polarization under Mayor Ed
Koch, progressives, LGBTQ people,
people of color, and the Reverend
Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition
of which he was a part turned to
Dinkins — the highest-ranking
Black offi cial in the city —to challenge
Koch in the Democratic primary.
That campaign was managed
by “the rumpled genius” Bill
Lynch, who would become his deputy
mayor.
Many LGBTQ leaders and an
AIDS movement radicalized by
the emergence of ACT UP in 1987
worked hard to defeat Koch and
elect Dinkins, the city’s fi rst and,
to date, only Black mayor. Dinkins
bested Koch, Comptroller Jay Goldin,
and civic leader Richard Ravitch
in the primary, exceeding the
40 percent necessary to avoid a
runoff. He then narrowly defeated
federal prosecutor Rudy Giuliani,
the candidate of white grievance.
At his inauguration on January
1, 1990, Dinkins reminded us that
his ancestors were brought to this
country “chained and whipped in
the hold of a slave ship.” But, he
added, “I see New York as a gorgeous
mosaic of race and religious
David Dinkins in 2017.
NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF RECORDS AND INFORMATION SERVICES
Mayor David Dinkins in the 1993 LGBTQ Pride March.
faith, of national origin and sexual
orientation, of individuals whose
families arrived yesterday and
generations ago.”
When some of us were appalled
after word emerged that he had
invited Cardinal John O’Connor,
New York’s virulently anti-gay
archbishop, to give a prayer at the
event, his team scrambled and enlisted
the New York City Gay Men’s
Chorus to sing from the balcony of
City Hall.
ACT UP had hounded Koch in
his last years as Mayor, fed up with
his half measures on AIDS. But
when Dinkins held a town meeting
at the LGBT Community Center in
REUTERS/ STEPHANIE KEITH
February 1990, it turned raucous
as he encountered a community
already impatient with the pace
of the changes needed. There was
fury over Dinkins’ appointment
— on the recommendation of Gay
Men’s Health Crisis and AmfAR’s
Dr. Mathilde Krim — of Dr. Woody
Myers, a Black public health professional
from Indiana, as health
commissioner. In that same role
for the State of Indiana, Myers
had supported PWA student Ryan
White in attending public school,
but his nomination in New York
was delayed when he told a reporter
that quarantine was a possibility
in the fi ght against AIDS. Myers
REMEMBRANCE
lasted about a year.
Among appointments received
more favorably were Dinkins’ posting
of out gay Dennis deLeon as
chair of the New York City Commission
on Human Rights and
out gay Dr. Billy Jones as mental
health commissioner and later
head of Health + Hospitals. I was
among the 15 unpaid members of
the Human Rights Commission.
We weren’t the city’s fi rst out commissioners
— Mayor Abe Beame
named Bob Livingston to the Human
Rights Commission in 1976
and Koch had Henry Geldzahler at
Cultural Affairs and David Rothenberg,
Joyce Hunter, and Jim Levin
at Human Rights — but Dinkins
also employed an array of LGBTQ
progressives in prominent positions,
including Marjorie Hill as
his liaison to the community, Allen
Roskoff, also on the Human Rights
Commission, and Barbara Turk as
deputy director for Health and Human
Services in the mayor’s Offi ce
of Management and Budget.
Dinkins had campaigned on a
promise to extend domestic partner
benefi ts to city employees, but
said he felt constrained by the fi scal
crisis that he inherited — the
“money excuse” that did not sit
well at all with a community that
had no access to benefi ts while all
heterosexuals did. He did establish
the city’s fi rst domestic partners
registry in March 1993 — an important
breakthrough that endures
even with the advent of same-sex
marriage — but waited until just
a few days before his reelection bid
to settle the six-year old lawsuit
by gay and lesbian teachers seeking
equal health benefi ts — a case
brought by Ron Madson and Richard
Dietz, Ruth Berman and Connie
Kurtz, and a third, anonymous
couple. The settlement extended
benefi ts to all domestic partners
of city employees — same-sex and
different-sex. In the long run, more
heterosexual couples took advantage
of it.
The threat of HIV to young people
came to the fore during his mayor-
➤ DAVID DINKINS, RIP, continued on p.8
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