Through politics and pride, Chelsea perseveres as LGBT enclave

Chelsea Now photo courtesy Philip Ryan

State Sen. Thomas Duane in 1991, when he was first elected to City Council

By Chris Lombardi

To many, the phrase “gay Chelsea” tends to evoke images of the well-manicured, super-buffed gym rat. But nowadays, it also conjures the political power player, as the neighborhood’s local councilmember and state senator are both proud gay leaders. That wasn’t the Chelsea of 30 years ago, when young LGBT members first arrived in the diverse, slightly seedy warehouse and seamen’s district. However, many of today’s issues are the same as three decades ago, from the housing costs that first brought the LGBT community north from the West Village to the epidemic that once ravaged gay America, with Chelsea as its epicenter.

This week, as people from all over the country arrive to celebrate New York’s Gay Pride Week, Chelsea Now asked some longtime LGBT Chelsea residents to reflect on the neighborhood they found and helped create, and what it means to them now.

As the West Village filled up with gays and lesbians from across the United States in the early ’70s, many began to look northward, for less-cramped and more affordable spaces. “By 1975, you couldn’t get a decent apartment in the Village,” said writer and photographer Philip Ryan, a founding member of Chelsea’s first gay-rights group. “So we began to peek north.” In a city that had been declared bankrupt only a few years earlier, he said, “the minute we crossed 14th St., you saw broken windows, trashcans overturned.”

Ryan and his partner at the time, the late Michael Shernoff (see page 15), found an apartment on 21st St. for $390 a month in the early ’70s. “When Michael and I moved in there, you couldn’t buy an English muffin,” he said. In a 1997 article for LGNY (later renamed Gay City News, Chelsea Now’s sister paper), Shernoff called the old Chelsea “a drab and gritty working-class neighborhood, populated by a combination of Irish, often the descendants of longshoremen who worked the Chelsea docks, Latinos, a sprinkling of upper-middle-class, and some pockets of gay men. Such demographics made Chelsea similar to San Francisco’s Castro before the gay influx there also enlivened a work-a-day neighborhood.”

However, Chelsea was also “a lot less safe than today for gay men,” Shernoff wrote. “We did not walk on the west side of Eighth Avenue between sunset and sunrise, and avoided Ninth Avenue altogether if possible because of a gang of teenaged bashers who roamed the neighborhood.”

In that supercharged, hyper-political, post-Vietnam era, many also began to organize—creating one of the first gay community groups in the country, the Chelsea Gay Association. One early CGA member was Michael McKee, now a tenants’ rights activist, who snagged an apartment on a treeless stretch of 17th St. in the mid-’70s. McKee described meeting Thomas Duane, now Chelsea’s state senator, at the very first CGA meeting in September 1977. “Louie [Weingarden, a well-known Chelsea musician] and I saw a flyer on the lamppost that said, ‘Lesbians and Gay Men, Meet Your Neighbors...’ Tom was 22 years old, very skinny, and a bundle of energy.”

McKee said the CGA first formed as an “alternative to bars, sort of a social and neighborhood group.” The group’s street fair and “closet sale,” one of Chelsea’s first, served as a sort of public coming-out for the association. But soon enough, CGA was also getting deeply involved in politics, marching at the Pride Parade and testifying on behalf of the city’s first gay-rights law—while also working to address safety issues on the ground. When meetings with local police about gay-bashing incidents proved fruitless, CGA acted.

“The 10th Precinct knew there was a problem, but they weren’t really doing anything,” McKee said. So Weingarden organized a gay “vigilante” group called SMASH (Society to Make America Safe for Homosexuals), recalled fondly by Ryan as “The Pink Panthers.” Ryan wrote a press release announcing that SMASH was going to “take on those thugs,” and the media zeroed in on the handful of men beginning their patrol. Eventually, CGA morphed into the now-national Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project.

Assemblymember Richard Gottfried, elected to represent Chelsea in 1970, told Chelsea Now that he was not surprised when CGA formed. “It seemed like a logical step” for a community finding its political feet, he said. Meanwhile, as both local safety and the economy began to improve, many of the gays attracted to Chelsea began to put down roots.

Tim Gay, a longtime Democratic activist and former Community Board 4 member, told Chelsea Now that those roots included the unprecedented step of home ownership. “You could buy a studio apartment at London Terrace Towers for $30,000 then,” said Gay of his current complex. “There were tons of guys who were suddenly calling their mom in New England, or Kansas, suddenly asking their parents, ‘I know we’re not speaking much, but if you could give me my inheritance now, I won’t have to bother you ever again.’ Gays were in Chelsea for the long haul—whatever happened.”

But ‘Whatever’ soon came to include the AIDS epidemic. By 1983, when New York held its first AIDS protest march, both Gay and McKee’s partners had died, and Chelsea’s zip code, 10011, registered the highest HIV infection rate in the city. The neighborhood soon hosted the now-national multi-service organization Gay Men’s Health Crisis, as well as countless actions by ACT-UP! (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power).

Laura Morrison, then Ryan’s business partner (and now Duane’s legislative director), remembers those years as one big flurry of activity. “On every lamppost or wall, someone had used wheat paste to put up a poster announcing a rally or an action,” she told Chelsea Now. “You could assemble people on a dime—and you did.”

Not all of the activism was for gay causes, either. “We found we could make common cause with senior citizens,” McKee said. “We had the same issues around Medicare, Medicaid, health needs as they did. We could make common cause with Latino tenants-rights group because we all felt excluded from decent housing. We decided we really were community-based.”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a Chelsea resident and representative for the neighborhood, agreed. “The LGBT community in Chelsea has never stood apart,” Quinn told Chelsea Now. “The leading gay activists were also leading tenant activists, like Michael McKee, or fighting for health care for all.” Quinn’s own entry into Chelsea politics, in 1989, marked a shift in Chelsea LGBT politics—from the streets to the phone banks.

As the 1990s began, LGBT political figures began to move more explicitly into mainstream politics—starting, perhaps, with the election of current Village Assemblymember Deborah Glick and Duane to the City Council. Ryan pointed out that for Duane, at least, the transition was anything but sudden. “Tom joined the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club when he was 24, 10 years before he ran for office,” Ryan said. “He sat, and he listened. And the old folks [at Penn South] recognized that. He worked very consciously to build their trust.”

With a laugh, Ryan added that with this move to electoral politics came a distinctly establishment style. “[They] weren’t those gay activists making trouble,” he said. “Tom Duane had these big horn-rimmed glasses, neatly combed hair, totally unthreatening. And Glick? To older voters, she could be your granddaughter.” With Glick and Duane’s Council election in 1991, Chelsea and the Village started offering a stream of gay and lesbian elected officials; Quinn, by then the Anti-Violence Project’s director, became Duane’s chief of staff and eventually succeeded him on the Council.

The early ’90s also saw the explosive growth of gay businesses, including the now-lamented Foodbar on Eighth Ave., which weathered the recession by converting from haute cuisine to comfort food. “It was someplace the community met,” Gay said. “As a freelancer, I would even ask them to take deliveries for me—and they always did.”

In 1994, the New York Times reported that “citing space, safety and economic considerations, at least a dozen new businesses run by gays or lesbians… have set up shop in the area from Avenue of the Americas to Ninth Avenue and between 13th and 23d Streets.” That same year, many of those businesses were “overwhelmed” during the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots in 1994, when millions converged on New York City to celebrate.

But by the end of the decade, Gay said, Foodbar was gone, an early casualty of rising rents. By the end of the decade, many signature Chelsea businesses would follow.

Those mid-’90s rent increases signaled a local boom that has not stopped, despite a short period after the September 11 attacks. Newer businesses, including those serving the gay community, tend to be less gritty. Long gone are Michael Shernoff’s “wonderfully sleazy Everard Baths and that infamous c—k sucking palace, The Glory Hole,” he wrote in LGNY. They were replaced in part by more high-end gay businesses, like the gay-DVD shop the Blue Store, and those serving “the stroller set” of young families with children.

Such gentrification also raised questions about Chelsea’s gay community. “We love having new people coming in, and that’s fine,” Quinn said. “But Chelsea was once more economically diverse. Now, we’re fighting to secure a place for less-affluent young people—anywhere in Manhattan!”

Today, new LGBT residents are more likely to end up in the East Village, Brooklyn or Hell’s Kitchen than Chelsea. Duane aide Colin Casey, a gay 25-year-old, told Chelsea Now that he never even tried to find an affordable place near Duane’s office on 26th Street. “I knew it was impossible.”

But the new, affluent Chelsea now faces some old challenges, starting with the area’s HIV-infection rates. Dr. Marjorie Hill, CEO of Gay Men’s Health Crisis, noted that “Chelsea was the epicenter of the epicenter” of the epidemic in the ’80s. “And right now, I’m looking at some data, and the highest rate of HIV in New York City is in Chelsea,” she added.

This high rate of new HIV infections among New York’s gay men is terrible, if unsurprising, news for Chelsea’s gay community, according to Gay. “We got complacent,” he said. “With all the retroviral drugs, all the ads showing HIV could be managed, what were we really teaching our young people?” In addition, he said, data also show a troubling infection increase in “guys my age, in their 40s and 50s, guys who’ve been through the safer-sex thing, now using meth… It’s a lethal combination of crystal meth and Viagra.”

But rather than stimulate mass action campaigns like those of ACT-UP!, or even guerrilla theater to highlight the new menace, Chelsea’s LGBT community has turned to more targeted solutions, like the Ali Forney Center’s testing initiative or the harm-reduction approach of GMHC’s crystal meth “treatment readiness” programs. Given the crisis, said GMHC’s Hill, “we have a ‘Chelsea-first policy’ for all our programs,” even though it has clients citywide.

Gottfried said that one of the greatest accomplishments of Chelsea’s LGBT community has been “a dramatic change in the straight world’s relationship to the gay community.” With an atmosphere where more and more people are out, he said, “Speaking from the straight side of the equation, I can tell you that very few people feel as free to deny they know gay people, or to call it an ‘aberration.’”

Asked about the future prospects of Chelsea’ LGBT community, most polled ranged from elegiac to pragmatic. Gay spoke despairingly about the losses inflicted by gentrification, but added that he does take heart from the profusion of young gay politicians who feel free to emphasize issues other than their sexuality, such as former borough presidential candidate Brian Ellner. “Brian lives in London Terrace,” Gay said. “All his ads had him walking hand in hand with his partner, saying simply: ‘My lover and I are against the war.’ Those ads were pretty effective.” Gay also pointed to some signs of renewed activism, like the new ACT-UP! chapter based at Unicorn Books on W. 22nd St. Meanwhile, Morrison conceded that for younger activists, the Internet may have replaced wheat paste. “Technology has changed things a lot,” she said.

Quinn talked in the most concrete terms, speaking of the Council’s efforts to develop new affordable housing on 25th and 17th Sts., so that the last traces of the formerly diverse LGBT neighborhood aren’t lost forever.

Warning against “false nostalgia,” Ryan emphasized that this is far from the first of Chelsea’s transformations. He described a moment from 1977 in a Chelsea hardware store, observing a retired dockworker.

“Back then, there were lots of workmen and construction people coming to the hardware stores on Eighth Avenue,” Ryan said. “I saw this guy, very frail, probably lived in one of the rooming houses. A union guy with a union card, and slipped into his peacoat he had a quart bottle of Bud. I suddenly had this feeling that I was seeing the last gasp of an earlier way of life.”

Ryan paused. “Chelsea—it’s always been in transition.”