One step into the Queens Winter Pride Dinner and Dance, Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) is immediately mobbed.

“I voted for you!” one woman shouts excitedly, rushing up to kiss Quinn on the cheek.

“I love your bracelet,” another exclaims, posing with Quinn for the first of seemingly hundreds she would allow throughout the night.

“Is Kim here tonight?” someone asks, referring to Quinn’s long-time partner, Kim Catullo.

“No, she couldn’t make it,” Quinn replies. “She’s got a case that’s going to trial a week from Monday.”

Queens is cold this evening, but inside the Astoria World Manor, where hundreds of New York’s gay establishment have gathered to eat, dance and celebrate the new year, the air is warm, the mood is inviting and Quinn, the city’s top gay official and a likely candidate for mayor next year, is flush with admiration.

“There used to be a time when politicians would think twice about going to an LGBT event,” she says.

But those days are long gone.

“If you’re a prominent elected official in this borough or anywhere in the city,” she says, “this is a have-to stop tonight.”

And indeed, throughout the night Quinn makes small talk with the likes of Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan/Queens), State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli (D) and Assembly Member Daniel O’Donnell (D-Manhattan), among the twenty-one elected officials who have come to speak and socialize.

Coming to Queens, she says, is like coming home. She recalls a time over a decade ago when, as executive director of the Anti-Violence Project, she and Danny Dromm, now a district leader and an expected candidate for City Council in Jackson Heights, would visit gay bar after gay bar, canvassing for people who needed assistance.

Now, as one of the most powerful officials in the city, she moves confidently through the room. As she does, she comes across a young man with bright green drinks in each hand.

“Double fisting it tonight, eh?” the speaker asks with a grin.

He laughs. “Yeah, a little bit of apple with some gin.”

“It’s very green,” Quinn says, letting off one of her trademark boisterous  laughs.

Receiving huge cheers and screams of approval as she takes the stage at the Pride event, Quinn’s support in the gay community seems solid. Yet, as her constituency and appeal broaden in preparation for next year’s mayoral race, certain pockets of the gay community, mostly activists and radical groups, have attacked her for some of the more mainstream positions she has taken over the past few years.

Housing activists, for example, were bewildered by her opposition to a bill last year that would expand services for poor and homeless people living with HIV. Quinn said she opposed the bill for purely financial reasons, saying the program would set an unmanageable precedent for dealing with homeless people with illnesses.

Quinn has also been slammed by critics for not vocally opposing Noach Dear’s Civil Court candidacy last year, given Dear’s record of homophobic remarks. And her failure to block New York Police Department rules restricting public gatherings without a permit has riled still others.

She admits to feeling the sting of criticism from her own community. But she says she does not let these feelings influence her approach to policy.

“Human nature is you want everyone to be happy,” she says. “Of course, it’s always a disappointment when people are unhappy. But the bigger disappointment would be if I took a position to make people happy.”

A politician cannot please all the people all the time, she says, especially one who is a high-profile representative of a community hungering for equal rights and wider acceptance.

“I understand that there are some folk in the LGBT community, as in others, who don’t agree with every position I’ve taken,” she says. “I will always listen to what opponents say. I’ll always listen to criticism.”

But as the prospective mayoral candidates jockey for support, some in the community have noted that Quinn, who would be the city’s first openly gay mayoral candidate, may not be able to rely on the gay vote wholesale.

“The community is not monolithic,” says Assembly Member Micah Kellner (D-Manhattan), introduced with cheers at the event as the first openly bisexual elected official in New York. “She’ll have to fight for support.”

City Comptroller Bill Thompson (D), another likely candidate for mayor who once employed Kellner, also enjoys broad support in the LGBT community, he notes.

“The question is can she unite her majority,” Kellner says, while standing in the middle of the vast banquet hall. “Politics is never smooth.”

Quinn first entered the rough world of New York politics in 1991 to manage the City Council campaign of Tom Duane, who became the first openly gay member of the Council. After Duane was elected to the state senate in 1998, Quinn ran for, and won, his old seat representing Chelsea and the West Village.

Duane says that while certain pockets of the community may disagree with some of her stances, there remains an overwhelming sense of pride in her accomplishments.

“Any controversy is not going to, in any substantive way, impact the community’s feelings for her,” Duane says. “On the core issues, on full equality and full civil rights, she’s 100 percent.”

Despite recent friction, Quinn’s own activist roots cannot be ignored, her supporters say.

Dromm, for one, remembers the day almost a decade ago when Quinn, Duane and several others were arrested for protesting the Saint Patrick’s Day parade in the Bronx.

“The cops said, ‘Those of you who want to get arrested stay on the street, and if you don’t, get back on the curb’,” Dromm says. “I stepped back on the curb. I didn’t want to get arrested.” Quinn, however, refused, and was handcuffed and led away.

“When people show that type of guts, the guts that Chris Quinn showed, that’s something that’s not easily forgotten,” Dromm continues. “Maybe she has to funnel it in a different way or use those types of skills to achieve what she wants, but I don’t really believe that Chris Quinn would ever forget, or has ever forgotten, her activist roots.”

Since becoming speaker, the organizers of the Fifth Avenue parade have invited her to march—she is, after all, not just a citywide official, but the first speaker of Irish descent. She has refused, citing the prohibition on gay participation in the parade.

The anti-establishment coterie of the LGBT community accuses Quinn of turning her back on them. But coming to the podium this night, she seems less the speaker of the City Council and more the speaker for her community. She sounds that protest note.

“We’re not going to be ignored by law enforcement!” she shouts into the microphone on the stage of the Pride event, cameras flashing. “We’re not going to have what happens to us denied! We’re going to have a name! We’re going to have justice delivered!” 



Photo by Dan Burnstein.