Category: LGBT

UFT: Daniel Dromm Scholarship Brunch

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LGBTQ pride, activism recognized

All the honorees take the stage with (from left) UFT President Michael Mulgrew and City Councilman Daniel Dromm.

By Sarah Herman

Originally published by the United Federation of Teachers on June 25, 2019

It’s significant that “we are at a point in our culture in this city that we’re celebrating the very things Daniel Dromm was persecuted for,” teacher Cory Coleman said at the second annual Daniel Dromm Scholarship Brunch at UFT headquarters in Manhattan on June 1.

The brunch kicked off Pride Month and honored members of the LGBTQ community past and present.

Coleman, an 8th-grade teacher and chapter leader at Robert F. Wagner MS in Manhattan, lauded Dromm, a former teacher and current chair of the City Council’s Finance Committee, for his advocacy on behalf of the LGBTQ community.

Dromm is a “fitting hero” for the cause, said Rashad Brown, the UFT Pride Committee chair and a chapter advocate. Brown said Dromm faced severe challenges as an openly gay teacher, but “the UFT stood behind him to make sure his rights were not violated.”

The committee honored three activists from different areas of the LGBTQ community, including Alan Reiff, a teacher at MS 424 in Hunts Point, the Bronx, who received the inaugural Daniel Dromm Educator’s Award for his activism as a proud UFT member and LGBTQ advocate. Five high school seniors received $1,000 Daniel Dromm Scholarships for being exemplary scholars and LGBTQ student activists.

Allessia Quintana, a social studies teacher at New Dorp HS on Staten Island, nominated her student, Michael Gatti, for the scholarship and joined him in celebrating his achievement. As the school’s student union president and an active member of its Gay Straight Alliance, Gatti is a “charismatic, elegant speaker” and “a well-rounded, kind-hearted, sensitive student,” Quintana said, but his best quality, she added, is humility.

Maggie Joyce and Ashley Reyes of PS 35 in the Bronx believe it’s important to teach acceptance at a young age. “It’s our responsibility to start somewhere,” said Reyes, a 1st-grade special education teacher. “Everyone has to be accepted for who they are,” added Joyce, the school’s chapter leader.

Reyes said seeing the UFT recognize LGBTQ students was inspiring. “The UFT does much more than advocating for teachers,” she said.

“LGBTQ rights,” said committee chair Brown, “are civil rights and human rights.”

See more photos in the gallery.

Read more here.

CUNY: LAGUARDIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE PRIDE MONTH AND THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE STONEWALL REBELLION

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Published in events.cuny.edu on June 25, 2019

To commemorate Pride Month and the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion, LaGuardia Community College collaborated with LaGuardia Airport and JetBlue on an exhibition on New York City LGBT history at the airport’s historic Marine Air Terminal. At the opening reception of the exhibition on June 14, historian Stephen Petrus at La Guardia and Wagner Archives commented, “The venue of this exhibition is entirely fitting. The LGBT community has long been prominent in the airline industry. Not only that, many individuals fleeing persecution from abroad because of their sexual orientation have entered America through LaGuardia Airport.” Port Authority executive director Rick Cotton added, “The establishment of our employee resource group, PA Pride, is critical to fostering an inclusive environment among our staff.

The exhibition is based largely on the Collection of Daniel Dromm, located at LaGuardia and Wagner Archives. Dromm was co-founder of the Queens Pride Parade in 1993 and is currently Chair of the Finance Committee in New York City Council. LaGuardia students Melissa Osoria and Srija Rai worked on the exhibition as interns at the Port Authority. A particular focus of the show is LGBT activism in Queens following the gay bashing murder of Julio Rivera in 1990 and the rejection of the citywide Children of the Rainbow Curriculum in 1992. Both events led to a surge of activism in the borough and the formation of LGBT organizations in many neighborhoods.

Date:

June 24, 2019 — August 31, 2019

College:

LaGuardia Community College

Address:

31-10 Thomson Avenue
Long Island City, Queens

Building:

LaGuardia Airport’s Marine Air Terminal

Phone:

(718) 482-7200

Admission:

Free

—

Read more here.

1010 WINS: Daniel Dromm: From the classroom to the Council chamber, he’s made waves

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By Kyle McMorrow

Originally published by 1010 WINS on May 30, 2019

When Daniel Dromm was a teacher at PS 199Q in Queens, he made his daily trip down to the cafeteria to bring his students back to their classroom after lunch. On one particular day, he saw a little girl on the line sobbing. When Dromm asked her why she was crying, she blurted out, “Because the kids are teasing me because my mom is a lesbian.”  At the same time, the School Board had been protesting a new curriculum –Children of the Rainbow – designed to teach tolerance of all of New York City’s diverse communities

“It was my school board president who went crazy over that,” Dromm said. “She hired buses to drive thousands of parents down to the Department of Education to protest that curriculum.”

Moved by his experience with the young student, Dromm gained media attention when he publicly supported the new curriculum.

A few months later, Dromm went to a meeting at the New York City Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center. “I raised my hand and I said, I’m a teacher in District 24, and like all the media zoomed in on me, and it was like, oh my gosh incredible. What did I just do? What did I just say? I had not really told my principal I was gay. I wasn’t really out to the other teachers.”

Courtesy of The Daniel Dromm Collection at the La Guardia and Wagner Archives

Soon after, Newsday did a featured story on Dromm, which put a spotlight on him and his private life. Dromm says he remembers feeling “sick that he had done it” the next morning. His school then became a hotbed of media attention until one day he called a press conference, which he credits as being the springboard into the next chapter of his life.

“I never really fully made the connection between education and politics until I actually came out and then I realized that all of education is really based on political decisions. I realized that in order to create change you had to effect the political climate.”

Today, Daniel Dromm is a New York City Councilman where he serves as the Chairperson of the Finance Committee.

Since venturing into politics, Dromm has served as a pioneer of the LGBT rights movement in Queens and organized the first Queens LGBT Pride Parade and Festival. He has not missed a Pride Parade in 44 years and plans to march again this year.

Read more here.

Advocate: NYC Schools Are Making LGBTQ History a Priority

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The inclusive curriculum has finally won support – showing how far the school system has come since efforts in the early 1990s.

By Trudy Ring

Originally published by the Advocate on January 17, 2019

In the early 1990s, a controversy over including LGBTQ material in New York City’s public school curriculum got the top education official fired and inspired a teacher to come out. But today that teacher is a member of the City Council who has led the charge for funding an inclusive curriculum that has won widespread support.

“Its very different from when I came out in 1992,” says Daniel Dromm, who chairs the City Council’s Finance Committee.

Dromm was a teacher in the New York public schools that year, when Chancellor Joseph Fernandez backed a curriculum called “Children of the Rainbow,” designed to teach children about diversity in race and other facets of identity, including sexual orientation. Just a tiny portion of the curriculum guide dealt with gay and lesbian issues, but it was enough to cause huge resistance from school board members. The curriculum was never adopted, and in 1993, Fernandez’s contract was not renewed.

And since then, one of Dromm’s goals has been to get an LGBTQ-inclusive curriculum into the public schools.

He was elected to the City Council in 2009, representing a district in Queens, and last year, as Finance Committee chair, he led the effort to fund the curriculum. In the budget for its 2019 fiscal year, which began last July, the council allocated $600,000 for inclusive educational programming.

The curriculum includes lessons about LGBTQ history and the pioneers of the LGBTQ rights movement; studying authors of color, with the students then meeting the authors; providing support to student gender and sexuality alliances (formerly known as gay-straight alliances); lessons for parents and families of LGBTQ youth on acceptance; and a partnership with public TV station WNET to give students online access to videos on LGBTQ figures and issues.

Through the curriculum, students will learn about history-making figures like Harvey Milk, Bayard Rustin, Audre Lorde, Barbara Gittings, Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and more. They’ll also meet people who are making history and creating culture today through a partnership with Lambda Literary’s Writers in Schools program, which has already started. Students have already been able to meet LGBTQ writers, which Dromm says has been “a highly motivational thing for these kids.”

Other aspects of the curriculum include the development of an interactive map to LGBTQ historic sites in all five boroughs of the city. It shows that such history didn’t take place just in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village at the Stonewall Inn, but also at PFLAG founder Jeanne Manford’s home in Queens.

The LGBTQ material is available at all levels of education, in an age-appropriate fashion, Dromm says. And unlike in 1992, there has really been no backlash.

“The feedback has been fantastic,” he says.

Council Speaker Corey Johnson, also a gay man, has championed the curriculum along with Dromm. Johnson, who came out at age 16, says he would have loved to have access to information like this when he was in high school.

“I can’t imagine what a difference this would have made,” says Johnson, who recalls feeling extremely isolated at the time. He didn’t know any other gay people, and he didn’t receive any information about LGBTQ history. “For me, this is personal,” he says.

He and Dromm are committed to continuing and expanding the curriculum, and hope to increase the funding. “We’re going to continue to push for funding on LGBT issues generally, and on this issue especially,” Johnson says. They also want students to learn about other historically marginalized communities, he adds.

Dromm notes, “What both of us are aiming to do is make it easier and more natural for kids to come out in schools and be accepted.”

The program has much support from other city officials such as schools Chancellor Richard Carranza (who has a twin brother, Reuben, who’s gay) and Jared Fox, the LGBTQ liaison in the city’s Department of Education, Dromm says.

Dromm is still struck by the difference in reaction to this curriculum almost 30 years later.

“It’s amazing to me,” he shares, stating that this reflects the changes in society due to more LGBTQ people coming out. “People’s hearts and minds have been opened,” he says.

“When people get to know us, it’s hard to discriminate against us.”

From left: Corey Johnson and Daniel Dromm

Read more here.

NY Post: Fewer NYC high school students identify as heterosexual than ever before

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By Carl Campanile

Originally published by the New York Post on December 24, 2018.

The number of Big Apple high-school students identifying solely as heterosexual has plummeted as more teens describe themselves as gay, lesbian, bisexual or without a defined sexual orientation, a new survey reveals.

Nearly one in four teens, 23.6 percent, now identify in categories other than straight — the highest level ever recorded, the 2017 Youth Risk Behavior Survey has found.

The biennial school-based surveys are conducted by the city Health Department in concert with the federal Centers for Disease Control.

Surveyed students were asked, “Which of the following best describes you?”

More than three in four, 76.4 percent, said they were “heterosexual (straight),” 3.1 percent said “gay or lesbian,” 7.6 percent said “bisexual,” 3.8 percent said “not sure” and 9.1 percent said none of the choices accurately describes them.

The 2017 study marked the first time the last option was provided.

But it is clear that more students are identifying as homosexual or sexually fluid.

In the 2015 survey, 85 percent of student respondents identified as straight and 15 percent as gay, lesbian, bisexual or not sure.

In 2007, 92 percent of students identified as straight and only 8 percent said they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or not sure.

One lawmaker said the data more accurately reflect the sexual orientation of young people as teens today more honestly describe their identity amid a lessening of discrimination.

“The stigma of being LGBTQ is gone,” said Queens Councilman Daniel Dromm, a former public-school teacher who is openly gay. “I don’t think it matters to young people. The students are more open than in my generation.”

“They are being more honest, and it’s a good thing that they’re being more honest.”

Dromm also noted that more young people are more fluid about their sexuality and are saying, “Don’t put me in a box.”

He said the results reminded him of the landmark 1948 sexual-behavior study by zoologist Alfred Kinsey and others that established the Kinsey Scale to rate people’s sexual orientation from exclusively straight to exclusively gay with gradations in between.

The survey’s assessment, Dromm said, will enable the city to better provide medical services and programs for LGBTQ youth.

Read more here.

WBAI 99.5 FM: Commemorating World AIDS Day

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Posted by WBAI 99.5 FM on December 1, 2018

On December 1, 2018, City Watch hosts Jeff Simmons and Edwina Martin focused on World AIDS Day with guests: New York City Council Member Daniel Dromm; Johanne Morne, Director of the New York State Department of Health’s AIDS Institute’ and, Eugene Eppes, a Community Linkage Specialist at Alliance for Positive Change.

For more information, click here.

JH Post: Ms. Colombia, Beloved Jackson Heights LGBT Figure, Found Dead

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By Tara Law

Originally published in the Jackson Heights Post on October 4, 2018

Ms. Colombia, a colorful and beloved figure in the Jackson Heights LGBT community, has been found dead, Council Member Daniel Dromm has announced.

Ms. Colombia, whose birth name was Osvaldo Gomez, was found dead in the waters off Jacob Riis Park, Dromm’s office said. No foul play is currently suspected, although the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has yet to determine the cause of her death. 

Dromm said that he remembered seeing her in many different parades across the city, including at the first Queens Pride Parade.

“She was beloved by all who saw her in the streets, at parades, and in the neighborhood wearing her colorful outfits and a bird on her shoulder,” Dromm said. “Her cheerfulness and ability to bring a smile to the faces of all who met her will be missed by all New Yorkers.”

He continued, “While life did not always treat Ms. Colombia with all the respect she was due, New Yorkers will remember Ms. Colombia as a hero to everyone.”

Ms. Colombia was featured in the docuseries No Your City, which profiled unusual New York City Characters, in 2015. 

In the film, she revealed that she was a lawyer and had moved to Queens from Colombia in 1975. 

After she was diagnosed with HIV in the 1980s, she decided to live “day by day,” she explained.

“I like to be free… They ask me, are you homo? Are you gay, are you lesbian? And I say, no, I am human being from another planet,” she said in the video.

Ms. Colombia said that she loved New York because she felt free to live the life she wanted.

Dromm said that his office is reaching out to community organizations to plan a vigil for Ms. Colombia, which will be announced soon.

Read more here.

Jackson Heights Post: March Promotes Trans Rights and Visibility in Jackson Heights

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(Photo: Make the Road New York/ Twitter)

By Tara Law

Originally published in the Jackson Heights Post on July 10, 2018

Trans people and their allies marched through Jackson Heights and Corona yesterday for the seventh annual Trans Latinx March.

The march is organized each year by TRIP Queens, the trans justice project of immigrant activist group Make the Road New York. The Trans Latinx March aims to promote awareness that trans people live in the neighborhood and are part of the community.

Several hundred marchers, including many in traditional Latino dresses, started the parade at Make the Road New York’s 92-10 Roosevelt Ave. office and then walked up Roosevelt to Junction Boulevard and back down 37th Avenue.

The march struck a somewhat more serious tone than the Queens Pride parade in Jackson Heights last month. The marchers passed by a shrine to 14 trans people who have been killed in the United States over the past year, and many marchers carried posters decrying transphobia.

Councilmember Daniel Dromm noted in a speech to the crowd that, in some ways, trans people have an even greater need for visibility than the LGBTQ community as a whole.

“This march is the most important march in Queens,” Dromm said. “We often forget about the T, in the LGBTQ.”

The Consul General of Mexico, Diego Gomez Pickering, also made an appearance to give an Ohtli Award to Bianey Garcia, an organizer for Make the Road’s trans project. The honor is among the highest awards handed out by the Mexican government to Mexican citizens living abroad.

Councilmember Francisco Moya also announced at the march that he intends to apply to the city to co-name Answer Triangle— which is located between the intersections of Whitney Avenue, Aske Street and Roosevelt Boulevard— Trans Latinx Triangle.

On Twitter, Moya said that the city should change the name of triangle into something meaningful that embodies, “love and acceptance.”

“Today we’re constantly asking the question, ‘who are we as a city, as a country?’” Moya  wrote. “Are we a place that tolerates hate, transphobia and bigotry? Or are we a place that offers refuge to the oppressed, where people are free to express themselves and their love however they want?”


Read more here.

NY Daily News: Adam Rippon honored by New York City Council during Pride Month

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Adam Rippon speaks outside City Hall where he was honored with a proclamation on June 8, 2018. (Jillian Jorgensen / New York Daily News)

By Jillian Jorgensen

Originally posted in the New York Daily News on June 8, 2018

Figure skater Adam Rippon — the first openly gay athlete to compete for the United States in the Winter Olympics — was lauded as an inspiration at City Hall Friday by Council Speaker Corey Johnson.

“You’ve captured the imaginations and hearts of straight people and gay people and have shown us that through bravery, hard work and grace we can all become the best of ourselves,” Johnson, who is also gay, said. “But you are especially a role model to LGBT young people, a role model for these kids who want to be the next Adam.”

Johnson presented Rippon with a proclamation at the event, held in the midst of New York’s Gay Pride Month.

Rippon, who won a bronze medal at this year’s Olympics, became well-known for calling out Vice President Pence’s support of conversion therapy, and for dubbing himself a “glamazon bitch ready for the runway.”

“To so many LGBTQ kids out there who struggle hard to become comfortable and to become who they truly are, you have been the answer to their collective prayers,” Johnson said. “You are the larger than life, ready for runway glamazon b-word we need right now.”

Rippon said he didn’t think of himself as a hero.

Adam Rippon competes during the Men’s Single Skating Short Program on Feb. 16, 2018, in South Korea. (Maddie Meyer / Getty Images)

“I don’t necessarily think that I’m brave or courageous. But I’ve thought about what people who I look up to, who my heroes are, why do I think that they’re brave,” he said. “And I’ve realized that bravery and courage, they come from a place of being confident, and they come from a place of being honest.”

Councilman Daniel Dromm, who noted he came out 45 years ago, lauded Rippon for doing so.

“Back then we would say invisibility is our biggest enemy. But in many ways invisibility still remains one of our biggest enemies,” he said. “And by you coming out, you have fought and you have made us visible and you have told people that even Olympians can be openly gay in this world.”

Council Jimmy Van Bramer recalled watching figure skating as a child with his mom and said Rippon, by being unafraid, gave others the same courage.

“When I was a kid growing up in Queens, never seeing an openly gay person who was powerful, strong, and unafraid, or portrayed in the media as someone who was good I could have used you when I was 9 or 10 years old,” Van Bramer said.

Read more here.