As LGBT Center turns 25, familiar faces remain

Barbara Warren and Robert Woodworth have been key leaders at the LGBT Community Center dating back to the 1980s. RIGHT: Lou Avanzato, perhaps the Center’s first employee, says she already misses the job she will likely leave next year.

BY PAUL SCHINDLER

In looking at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center a quarter of a century after its founding, one of the most striking factors that emerges in trying to get to the core of its success is the amazing institutional memory that some of its key staff members bring to West 13th Street every day.

Just over 18 months ago, executive director Richard Burns celebrated his 20th anniversary at the helm, and in an interview with Chelsea Now, he talked about the Center’s previous two decades, weaving it into the history of the LGBT community nationwide, its promising advances, its political reversals, and the devastating heartbreak it endured from the scourge of AIDS — as well as his own personal story as an activist, gay journalist, and attorney going back 10 years earlier to his life in Boston.

In interviews last week, three other longtime Center employees brought their own stories to bear on a facility that one said “would be hard not to know about now” if you’re an LGBT New Yorker.

Robert A. Woodworth ran his own consulting business and was a member of the gay Greater Gotham Business Council in the early 1980s when talk first surfaced among New York LGBT leaders about the need to launch a community center.

“Nobody knew where anybody was,” Woodworth recalled about a queer community experiencing an explosion of organization-building without benefit of e-mail or cell phones.

As it happened, several early LGBT organizations — including SAGE, the Metropolitan Community Church and the Community Health Project, what was then a new amalgam of two existing efforts serving gay men and is now the Callen-Lorde Community Health Center — were subleasing space at 208 W. 13th Street along with other progressive and community action groups. At the time, the city owned the building and rented it to a group called Caring Community.

But the city wanted to unload the building and as the fledgling LGBT groups worried about where they would next turn for space, Woodworth was among an ad hoc group of activists and leaders who began a conversation about the possibility of buying the building to establish the community center they felt was needed. The first hurdle was the lack of any model out there for how the gay community would make something like this happen.

But then Gay Men’s Health Crisis — itself just getting off the ground in a frantic effort to mount some response to AIDS amidst considerable indifference at every level of government from City Hall up — showed the way. In May 1983, the group held a Ringling Brothers Circus fundraiser at Madison Square Garden that drew more than 15,000 people. The move was risky — nobody knew for sure how many would in fact turn out and more critically somebody had to put out the rental money upfront.

“It was an amazing event,” Woodworth recalled.

What GMHC discovered is that gay people with money were willing to stand up for the community by making interest-free loans to float the rent, and those working to launch a community center seized on that lesson. The group quickly raised north of $200,000 in donations or no-interest loans; a year later they began the process of persuading the lenders to renew the loans for another year. By the end of 1983, the city had approved the new community center’s purchase of its current home, at a price of $1.5 million, with 10 percent down required.

Woodworth worked on a consulting basis — yet still put in a lot of hours — until becoming a full-time employee in 1985. He remembers two critical decisions made about the Center’s original name — the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center.

“Using the word lesbian at that time was not that common,” he recalled, “let alone putting it first.”

And in trying to win city approval for the purchase of the building, “the use of the word ‘services’ was quite conscious because the New York gay crowd was not seen as a cooperative crowd. We wanted to put the emphasis on services, not on egos.”

The moment when the 13th Street building became the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center, Woodworth said, “was a watershed shift for the gestalt of the community. Crossing the threshold, people would have this amazing epiphany because the normative experience of gay people at that time was all about the need to protect yourself. The community had a concrete place, a home, for the first time.”

During the intervening years, the Center’s function has broadened from opening up community meeting spaces and similar facilities to providing a deepening range and sophistication of social services, producing cutting-edge cultural programming and pursuing public policy goals. And Woodworth, now director of meeting and conference services and capital projects, recalls that he’s probably had “eight or 10 jobs since I started.” The current challenge facing him is oversight of a major capital expansion that by 2012 could double the Center’s space through construction of a building adjacent to the current one over the space now occupied by the outdoor garden and the youth services offices.

The Center is currently at the early stages, both in terms of design — significant city landmarks issues, to name just one area of concern, need to be examined — and budget projections, but Woodworth estimated that total construction expenditures and operating cost endowment requirements will likely total $50 million. Nearly $12 million in government commitments, from both the city and state, have been secured, while the private donation campaign, which is expected to raise half of the total, is still in its “quiet phase,” largely confined to date to efforts among Center board members.

In 1987, Dr. Barbara A. Warren was a psychologist affiliated with Pace University Downtown doing work on substance abuse. Recently divorced — yes, she’s heterosexual — she felt it was time for a change and had tentatively decided on a big one. She was prepared to move to Auburn University in Alabama to work as a sports psychologist.

Then she got to know Richard Burns, who convinced her that her expertise on substance abuse treatment and her experiences in counseling LGBT students at Pace, coupled with a relationship to gay liberation activists dating back to her college days at Antioch in Ohio, suited her to run a recovery program at the Center.

She and Burns discussed at some length, Warren said, the issue of her sexual orientation — not with regard to her qualifications for the job, but rather in terms of how the Center community and LGBT New Yorkers generally would respond to a straight woman in such a prominent post.

In terms of flak, time would prove, Warren took it coming and going. There was backlash among some in the queer community.

“Lesbians in particular often seemed suspicious or wary of me,” she recalled.

Later when Warren assumed leadership of all the Center’s social services, she became the target of criticism over the founding of the Gender Identity Project to serve the transgender community. Some lesbians organized a zap in protest.

But, the GIP was a mission that Burns was right with her on, though it needed selling to some on the board. In the view of some lesbians at the time, Warren said, “there is only a Gender Identity Project because a straight woman started it.” Another formulation, she said, was the charge of hypocrisy against the Center’s “gay men who are feminists but are capitulating to these fake women.”

But friction with some in the LGBT community was nothing compared to the negative attention she received from many straight professional colleagues outside the Center. Warren described being at a conference of roughly 3,000 mental health professionals in Washington at the end of the Reagan era. She was the only one with a name tag identifying a gay or lesbian organizational affiliation.

“People would refuse to talk to me,” she recalled. “When we had to do an exercise that involved everyone holding hands, two women would not take my hand. I don’t know if they thought I had AIDS or what.” The experiences were her “Gay Like Me” moments, reinforcing for her “how important it was to create sanctuary space.”

An advantage of her being straight, Warren explained, is in her ability to “model behavior for other straight allies of the community.” Still, in looking back two decades, her “biggest regret is that I haven’t done enough to get more straight allies involved. I still find it hard to engage straight allies to the level of engagement that the queer movement needs to achieve our social justice needs.”

Her goal of engaging those outside the community has naturally led Warren to expand the scope of her responsibilities; she is now director of organizational development, planning and research — a portfolio that takes her to City Hall, Albany and Washington as a leading public policy advocate for the community.

In that work, she has come to admire not only the efforts of openly gay political leaders, including State Senator Tom Duane and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, but also the sort of leadership that Governor David Paterson showed last month in moving the state toward full recognition of legal gay marriage from outside New York.

“What the governor did was extraordinary and he talks about it in terms of his gay uncles,” she said. “It shows why personal relationships are so important.”

Enthusiastic as well about Barack Obama’s presidential bid, Warren said that the community nationwide is prepped to realize the same sorts of advances it has enjoyed recently in Albany in Washington as well.

“I could see real social justice and full equality within five years,” she said. “Then we need to work on access and parity in results.”

For Lou Avanzato, the past 25 years she’s devoted to the Center have been “a labor of love.” When the city still owned the 13th Street property, she explained, it decided it was best to find a gay building superintendent to work amongst the LGBT organizations already renting space there. Alerted to the opening by the Metropolitan Community Church where she already worked, Avanzato got the job — but not before a comical scene played out with a city official.

Headed for an interview at a municipal office, she decided to dress up in a nice blouse and slacks. When the man doing the hiring came out of his office, he said, “Where’s the gay job applicant,” but when Avanzato raised her hand, he kept insisting, “No, I’m looking for the gay applicant.”

“I guess he didn’t think I was gay,” she recalled, with a laugh, “and here I’m so dykey.”

Avanzato said she was “probably the first employee of the Center,” but now admits she bluffed her way through her original interview. When asked if she had ever been a building superintendent, she said, “Oh, yeah.” In fact, she had covered for her own apartment building super for a weekend exactly once. For the next 15 years, Avanzato shoveled coal into the Center’s antiquated furnace, a job she said burns most men out in three to five years. Asked how she endured so long, she replied, “I’m Canadian. When you’re Canadian, you shovel coal.”

Avanzato, who is 67, has lived in Woodside, Queens for the past 38 years but says that her time in New York is drawing to an end. In 1994, she and her girlfriend had a holy union ceremony and registered their partnership with the city as soon as that became a reality in New York.

“I definitely knew we would stay together,” Avanzato said. “We adore each other.”

Her partner is younger than she is and when she finishes up a nursing program next year, the couple plans to move to Florida.

“I’m missing this place already,” Avanzato said, mentioning a recent knee injury that had her out of work for four months. “I obviously don’t move on from things easily.”