With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir by Christine Quinn

father to reach this point. I can’t say I know what the journey has been like for him. As I’ve said, we’re not a family that talks about such things. But for me the most significant lesson is that people have an enormous ability to evolve and accept. You can’t demand that everyone evolve and accept in the ways you want them to, but things work out. And the love that exists between my father and me is palpable. Though it is silent in words, it is loud in deeds.

C HAPTER 7
    Duane’s World
    W hen I first went to work for Tom Duane’s 1991 campaign, we didn’t know who his opponent in the primary would be. It was a newly redrawn district that was heavily LGBT. The incumbent decided not to run again, and then Liz Abzug, whose mother was the legendary feminist liberal congresswoman Bella Abzug, decided to run. Liz was also LGBT.
    Tom had very deep roots as a neighborhood and LGBT activist. As my father used to say, “The man joined everything!” He had been a district leader and a community board member, and he had written a zoning plan for the neighborhood, for starters. It was almost impossible to identify a local issue that Tom hadn’t been involved in, at least tangentially. He was committed to the people in his district on all levels, and he felt a personal urgency around LGBT issues and HIV and AIDS.
    Tom was HIV positive. He told me this in a completely roundabout way one night, and we often still joke about it.
    He called me late one evening at work when I was the only person in the office, and he said, “They formed this new HIV-positive Democratic club, and they’re going to have their first meeting.”
    “Great, you should go,” I said.
    “Well, it’s only for people who are HIV positive,” he said. “It’s not for allies.”
    “Well, I think you can probably still go as a candidate,” I said.
    And he said, “Well, I am HIV positive, so if I go more people will know.”
    Only a bit surprised, I shook my head. How are we going to deal with this? I wondered. But Tom knew—he already had a plan.
    Tom had to be honest about his HIV status, and he was determined to be, so there was never any question that he would go public. But we had no idea how people would react. And we could not anticipate the potential fallout. Today it would not be as major an issue, but you have to put yourself back into history. This was 1991. AIDS was still a complete epidemic.
    There was real prejudice against people who were infected with HIV and tremendous fear about the disease. As far as we could tell, Tom would be the first openly HIV-positive person to run for public office anywhere in the world. We lacked precedents for what was happening, but luckily a volunteer on the campaign was a public relations director for a large nonprofit, and he helped us develop a plan and manage the media storm.
    We settled on sending out, at the beginning of the campaign, a very simple personal letter from Tom to all his constituents, in which he discussed his HIV status. We leaked a copy of the letter to the New York Times and timed the mailing so that the letter would get to people the same day the Times story broke. So that morning there was a cover story in the Times ’s Metro section about Tom’s HIV status. (Back then there was still a separate Metro section with local news.)
    We had arranged for Tom to be out leafleting at a subway entrance on the corner of Eighth Avenue and Twenty-third Street that morning. The response was beyond anything anyone could have imagined. Dozens of reporters and photographers and television cameras showed up at a press conference later that day, and Tom calmly took everyone’s questions. The night before the Times story, the phone rang off the hook, and the PR guy who was helping us said, “Just don’t answer it.” Those were the days of answering machines, and we could hear all the messages people were leaving. One of the calls was from the New York Post, which had gotten wind of the letter