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This is a good bit of history told from a personal perspective that shows the character and commitment of Sen. Kennedy. Thanks, Tanya. — Pam.
Remembering Ted Kennedy for his Compassion and Courage
By Tanya Domi
In the passing of Senator Ted Kennedy, I will always remember him for his deep compassion and strong support for members of the gay community.
I had the opportunity to work with Kennedy’s office on the introduction of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act as the legislative director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1994.
Kennedy agreed to introduce the ENDA in fall 1993 shortly after the adoption of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in fall 1993. All of us working on the military ban took the defeat badly. But we picked ourselves up and got to work quickly. In less of a month after DADT was adopted, along with the then-Human Rights Campaign Fund and my colleagues Dan Zingale, Nancy Buermeyer and Cathy Woolard we began building a coalition of groups to support ENDA with the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, led by Ralph Neas, its executive director at the time. LCCR supported ENDA, historically supporting for the first time gay rights legislation by the most imminent group of civil rights organizations in America.
The first hearings were scheduled in the Senate with Senator Kennedy chairing, arranged by Michael Iskowitz, his diminutive aide on gay and disability rights. Republican Senator Dan Coats of Indiana, who had strongly opposed lifting the military gay ban, also served on the labor committee, but we did not expect him to attend the hearings.
Before the hearings began, we had gathered in a conference room behind the hearing room to finalize preparation of our witnesses, Cheryl Summerville, who had been fired by a Cracker Barrel restaurant in Tennessee for being a lesbian and Ernest Hopkins, a postal worker from Cincinnati, Ohio, who had been beaten unconscious in his work place by co-workers for being gay. Suddenly, a significant number of black men, who had been standing in line to enter the hearing room, wearing orange buttons which said “they are not equal” were led through the conference room by a Coats’ aide. With no Capital police present, they began yelling epithets at Cheryl and Ernest and our group, pushed and shoved Ernest, jostling Cheryl as a number of us jumped in to stop the hitting and moved them out of room. A very upsetting event and a despicable tactic employed by Coats’ staff, which was simply a violation of Senate protocol in everyway imagined.
The hearings began shortly after this disturbing event. Senator Kennedy entered the hearing room and began his opening remarks. He called on Cheryl Summerville to make her opening remarks, who was crying, so upset by what had just transpired behind the hearing room.
In a soft voice, Kennedy applauded her courage and told her that she was very brave to come to the Congress to testify about her experience at Cracker Barrel. He said that she should take her time and take a deep breath. Somehow, Cheryl pulled herself together and delivered her testimony.
I was sitting next to Tim McFeely, the executive director of HRCF, softly crying, along with Tim who had red eyes. We were all very upset. But Cheryl testified and so did Ernest, telling their compelling stories of unquestionable employment discrimination. We got through the day with Kennedy putting into the record lesbian and gay stories and their experiences of on-the-job discrimination for the first time in history. That is the Senator Ted Kennedy I will always remember. May he rest in peace.
Tanya Domi worked for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force 1992-1994, serving as the director of the military freedom project and legislative director. She teaches human rights at Columbia University as an adjunct professor of international and public affairs and lives in the City of New York.
8 Comments
I Miss Teddy AlreadyIt’s strange. I guess I knew this day was looming.
The type of brain tumor Teddy had is a tough one to survive. Even with all of our medical miracles, some cancers don’t respond.
Then, when Eunice Kennedy Shriver died and Teddy was too ill to attend her funeral, I feared the worse but still not wanting to imagine it. Like I said, it’s strange.
That’s A Blast From The PastSeeing Nancy Buermeyer’s name in print.
The woman who along with Riki Wilchins and Winnie Stachelberg did their utmost during the 90′s to keep transgender people out of ENDA.
An emotional sceneTanya, thanks for sharing your experience. It shows Teddy’s humanitarian empathy he developed out of all the pain and tragedy he suffered in his life. I don’t remember this hearing being widely reported, but we didn’t have blogs back then. Sen. Coats a monster worried about gays glancing at the private parts of other servicemen. He and Helms standing in line to view the Mapplethorpe exhibition and then closing it down because it showed “the dick”. Helms, Thurman and Coats, ignorant sick bastards.
Parents’ prideWhy is it my Hoosier birthplace also produces so many Neanderthals and so many of them are named Dan? Dan Coats. Dan Quayle [nuff said]. Dan Burton, who, of course, is rabidly antigay, and despite being most [in]famous for having called reporters to his DC backyard to watch him literally shoot a watermelon to “prove” that Vince Foster was murdered so he could use it to implicate Les Clintons keeps getting reelected. And, back home again, his drooling state legislator brother, has tried to block funding for the homoloving Kinsey Institute and IU’s GLBT Student Support Services Center. But I digress.
RE Ted Kennedy: Sometimes realization comes on unexpected paws. At some point, sometime in 1977, as I recall, the politically conservative, devoutly Catholic, Air Force career parents of Leonard Matlovich were still experiencing a kind of PTSD…Post Your Gay Son Being on the Cover of Time Magazine Stress Disorder. And not only had his father first discovered his son was gay by reading it in the newspaper, but that he was suing the Air Force.
Now both loved their son without question, but three plus+ decades ago having a gay revolutionary in your family was a bit disconcerting to most parents.
But then Leonard took them to a gay rights event where they met Ted Kennedy who, despite their political differences, they understood to be “the real thing” [and I think Catholics of all kinds were proud of the family that had broken the White House ceiling].
Leonard said that he could tell they instantly looked at him and his role in the struggle for gay equality with new eyes and understanding.
Indiana TroclydytesOkay Michael I am LOL–yes, Hoosierland is filled with a lot of white bread, processed right wing nuts (remember the KKK was very strong in Indiana and Martinsville was ground zero for the Klan). We have a saying here in NYC that you meet some of the nicest people from Indiana…because we all left the state. OMG, I appeared on Larry King Live with Dan Coats about the miltary ban. We were sitting shoulder to shoulder in very tight quarters. He was so disgusting, but I knew I had to do something to disarm him. There was a bit of chit chat and of course I told him I was from Indianapolis. So Larry opens up the program and the first thing out of mouth was that I suspected the only thing Senator Coats and I would agree on tthat night was the hope the Indiana University’s basketball team would win. It was a great move I thought because he laughed. And then Larry King always endeared himself to me for asking Coats when did you decide you were straight? He always asks that question of guests discussing gay issues of the heterosexist opponent. I left the state long ago, as soon as I entered the military and returned for a brief time to finish school, but moved to Michigan to finish university and never went back. There is one good soul from Indiana who served in Congress and that was the late Frank McCloskey, former mayor of Bloomington (the oasis of Indiana) who I worked for on the Hill. He supported lifting the ban and on the day I testified before the House Armed Services Committee, Frank greeted me from the dais calling me his friend. He took a lot of heat for that vote. We later became very close as I moved onto international work in Bosnia, due to his involvement. He lost his seat in the 1994 republican landslide and spent a lot of time in Bosnia helping the Bosnians get the situation sorted out. I saw him many times as I lived there for four years. He died prematurely due to stomach cancer and is buried at Arlington–a true patriot and a great fighter for civil rights and dignity.
Another connection? WOW!
Thank you for reminding me of dear Frank McCloskey. Though not a student [you know how we "outside agitators" are], I was head of the gay group at Indiana University, for a time, when Frank was Bloomington’s mayor. He was loved by progressives and hated by the rednecks because he had aggressively come out against our involvement in Vietnam. And one of the ways they tried to smear him was….wait for it….to spread a rumor that the married father of two had been caught “WITH A MAN!”
Sadly, we didn’t have occasion to become friends, but in a one-on-one meeting in 1975 to discuss Bloomington’s proposed gay rights ordinance I felt the need to be honest with him after the local religious fascists had taken out a full page stop the sodomites newspaper ad. I told him that I’d like to be able to say gays locally had the political numbers to help save him in any election challenge, but I couldn’t, and I always remembered and admired him for saying he knew that but that it didn’t matter. He eloquently defended the bill at the religious screamers-permeated city council meeting and it passed-one of the earlier city gay rights bills in the country.
His premature passing was a loss in so many ways, and I envy your having known and worked with him.
There are, of course, many good people still in Indiana [not to mention fried green tomatoes and Morel mushrooms], and, post Inaugural disappointments notwithstanding, I confess to tearing up a bit when, last year, Indiana went for a Democratic Presidential candidate for the first time in FORTY-FOUR YEARS and, most miraculously of all-a black Democratic candidate!
Going for Barack in HoosierlandHey I agree Michael about being moved during the elections when Indiana went for Barack–as you say the first time since LBJ carried the state in 1964. It has been a long drought. I was really tuning in yesterday when Birch Bayh gave an interview on Ted Kennedy. I worked on his campaign in 1970–Teens for Bayh etc. His son is no chip off the block. Yes, Frank was a good guy…very much missed. I am working on getting a street named for him in Sarajevo at the moment.
I will concede that when I hear the song “Back home again in Indiana…” it brings back some good memories when I was young. But for better and better, I am a New Yorker through and through.
Tanya
And, of course….
Birch, who helped pull Ted Kennedy out of that ’64 plane crash and was AMAZINGLY lead in the Senate for the ERA, was one of those liberal US Senators driven out by a right wing junta er PAC led by the closeted gay Terry Dolan ["we want people to hate Birch Bayh without even knowing why"] who also helped elect gay genocidist Ronald Reagan. He would be right at home in organizing the armed mobs now attacking mere discussions of health care.
That is, if he were still alive. His brother, Reagan’s chief speechwriter, paid for a two-page ad in The Washington Times denouncing the Washington Post for revealing that Terry had died of AIDS. And the Dolan clan was so ashamed of his being gay [tho they claimed religion had saved him from it] that they banned any of his gay friends from his funeral. Of course, the homohating Pat Buchanan, Orrin Hatch, and Pat Robertson got orchestra seats.
PS: That Humpty Dumpty neonazi Karl Rove cut his gay smear teeth early. At 22, he defeated Terry Dolan for chairman of the College Republicans by a whisper campaign about Dolan’s sexuality.